


Not Even Miracles

by everyonewasabird



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types, Les Misérables - Victor Hugo
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst with a Happy Ending, Asexual aromantic Enjolras, Badass Cosette, Canon Era, Canon-Typical Violence, Combeferre & Enjolras Platonic Life Partners, Cosette makes friends, F/M, Families of Choice, Fix-It, Gen, Gender Dysphoria, Grief/Mourning, Heavy Angst, Javert Lives, M/M, Multi, Police Brutality, Post-Barricade, Queerplatonic Relationships, Racism, Somebody Lives/Not Everyone Dies, Trans Enjolras, Transphobia, discussion of suicide
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-01-21
Updated: 2021-01-09
Packaged: 2021-02-27 14:15:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 14
Words: 89,519
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22338385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/everyonewasabird/pseuds/everyonewasabird
Summary: Post-barricade survival fic about found family. Combeferre searches for Enjolras, Cosette tries to save her father, Enjolras atones, and Courfeyrac struggles to come to terms with all of it.Not an everybody lives AU, but I promise there's a happy ending for everyone who made it out.
Relationships: Combeferre & Cosette Fauchelevent, Combeferre & Courfeyrac & Enjolras (Les Misérables), Cosette Fauchelevent & Jean Valjean, Courfeyrac/Cosette Fauchelevent/Marius Pontmercy, Enjolras & Les Amis de l'ABC
Comments: 211
Kudos: 106





	1. Homo and Vir

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter content warning: major character death, violence, injury, racism, mention of slavery, transphobia, misgendering.
> 
> If there's any content I should tag for that I'm not tagging, please let me know!
> 
> Constructive criticism welcome!

_June, 1832_

The bayonet descends three times in rapid succession. The first blow is a startling fiery brand through Combeferre's shoulder; by the third he feels only a sharp rap, like knuckles on a door. Something goes wrong with his breathing.

The national guardsman falls from his arms.

The soldier with the bayonet is a looming shadow--gray mustache, red face, frightened eyes. Combeferre tries to say something, but the soldier runs, and the sunlight falls on Combeferre again. He is kneeling. He was trying to save the wounded guardsman. It balanced nothing; it never balances. Even so, in laying down his rifle and lifting the man, he felt the return of a long-lost peace.

He sways but stays upright on his knees, for a moment. He looks up at the barricade.

Enjolras towers there. He is blurred, but the gold of his hair is sunlit, and his crimson hands are bright and fast. If Combeferre called out, he would turn. Enjolras cannot afford to turn, not with the shots ringing and the men with swords and bayonets cresting the barricade like the spray of the rising tide.

Combeferre smiles.

Then he raises his eyes from Enjolras to the dark blue of the sky. He opens his heart one last time and feels the infinite depths above him and the infinitesimal _I am._ It is enough.

He makes no sound as he falls.

\--

Combeferre wakes half-trampled by fleeing men. His chest is fire. There is blood in his mouth, there is blood everywhere, bubbling as he tries to inhale. The barricade is falling. He is alone. He whimpers, terrified, and hears his voice gurgle.

"Hush now," a man says, very soft. Combeferre feels himself being lifted. "It's all right."

It is not all right. Combeferre is a doctor; he knows. Even so, he rests his head on the man's shoulder and is comforted. White hair brushes his face. He recognizes the old man who slips between bullets like a ghost, who saves lives with rifle shot, who carries the dying to the basement one by one. If he is to have a thought after the sky, he is glad it should be him.

The old man lays Combeferre on the floor between Bahorel's cold body and Courfeyrac's warm one. He will die among his friends. Their company is another kind of peace.

\--

He wakes as rough hands move him. It hurts. He struggles. It is hard to breathe. He lacks the strength to struggle much. Someone pries his grip from Courfeyrac's hand.

\--

There is a period of shadows. There is pain, a great deal of it. Days and nights are a succession of half-recalled nightmares he never quite wakes between. There are the various indignities of the sickroom and the half-heard voice of his mother.

He learns in time he is in his mother's bedroom, occupying her narrow bed. She is getting older, she needs her bed herself--but no one listens to his arguments. He is arguing badly. He realizes there is fever.

Combeferre loves his mother. They do not get along. Current circumstances are not helping. He tries to be kinder.

He was not meant to survive. He demands to know why he did.

He remembers he was trying to be kinder and resumes trying.

\--

He wakes at last with his head clear. He is weak. There are bandages. One can age a sickroom by its strata, like sedimentary rock. He surveys the liniments, cotton wool, and lancet on the bedside table, the lint in a basket in the corner, the discarded sewing and books stacked by the armchair, and the empty bottle of laudanum that has rolled under the table, replaced by another atop it. He has been here a long time. Weeks, certainly, but more likely months.

He asks his mother when she returns. It is August.

He is not certain he is strong enough for the next question. Perhaps he lacks the strength not to ask.

"Have any of them come?"

"Some doctors stopped by."

"Doctors?"

"And very kind of them it was, too. It is not as if we are fine people nowadays, not since your father--"

"What doctors?"

"A couple of old men. I don't know."

Not Joly or any of them. Combeferre subsides against the pillow.

From what she tells him, the story of his survival is something like the following:

A surgeon Combeferre used to work under was an enemy combatant that day. They once saved lives together; such is civil war. Searching for survivors after the fighting, this man found Combeferre.

Perhaps the surgeon thought of some day in the operating theater, some impassioned discussion, some patient they had worked on together--does it matter? Any explanation would sound like madness now, as mad as sparing an artillery sergeant for his blue eye while you gun his brothers down. What constitutes a good enough reason? Either they all mattered or none of them mattered.

The surgeon removed the coat of his own National Guard uniform. He fitted Combeferre's bleeding torso with it and ordered him carried to the infirmary like any national guard.

Combeferre would have fought that surgeon if he could have.

\--

When at last Combeferre descends the long flights of stairs from his mother's rooms, summer is gone. Paris looms frightening and alien around him: gray sky, wet and dirty streets, trees clinging to their last leaves, a cold he can no longer tolerate. His mother lives too near the place. There is a direction from her rooms in the little Rue du Cygne he will never walk. He shuffles a slow half block to the busy corner of the Rue St. Denis and has to sit. There is a palsied tremor in what were once surgeon's hands. Passersby only look away. He wonders whether all his friends are dead.

He believed in the truth of many things, once. All those things now are--no, perhaps not less true. He is not myopic enough to believe his sorrow eclipses the universe.

But a light has gone out. The truths of the world are like patterns of nerves projected upon a screen by a lantern and a lens. When the lamp extinguishes, the nervous system remains as it always has been, but the hanging sheet means nothing.

He rises from the cold step and shuffles back through the wet, dead leaves like an old man.

\--

The police come, but the questions are perfunctory. It seems the surgeon who saved his life swore Combeferre was working as his assistant that day, serving his king as a good doctor should. No reliable account contradicts this. Combeferre's mother begs him not to tell them otherwise, and he has disappointed her so many other times he obeys. His silence burns like stomach acid in his throat.

Letters arrive from his colleagues at the hospital. He answers none of them. He receives a letter from that surgeon and throws it in the fire unopened.

He never precisely decides not to return to medicine. He tells himself he is waiting for his hands to steady, for his strength to return. Those things improve, and still he does not go back. That future hangs empty with all the other abandoned futures.

\--

As the days grow shorter, he writes careful letters to addresses he learned by rote, for keeping records was dangerous. Some receive answers. The answers break his heart.

In the gray of November, a letter arrives addressed in Courfeyrac's father's hand. Combeferre's letter had been to Courfeyrac. He knows what this means.

He leaves it unopened on his desk. He does not look at it, and the gravity of the room bends around it. It is a hideous, all-consuming presence there, like a gravestone. After a week of this, he realizes his grief in seeing the words cannot be worse. He opens and reads.

Courfeyrac is in prison. Courfeyrac is alive.

Some thumbscrew-tight tension through Combeferre's body breaks apart, and he is sobbing and choking with his face on his desk, and he cannot breathe and he cannot stop. When it releases him, he has sore muscles in his chest and back and fresh aches in his newly healed ribs.

More letters come with news of more dead friends. A wedding invitation comes from Pontmercy; Combeferre is glad to hear it, but he will not attend. Then a letter arrives in Joly's hand, saying he and Bossuet lived. Their letter too speaks of a marriage, this one a fait accompli. They kept it quiet due to the legal irregularities--those being that there are three of them in it. Combeferre smiles as he reads. That is the last good news he receives.

Of Enjolras he hears nothing.

He has read every newspaper article and every account of every barricade that day. He read with anxious suspense of Jeanne on the run and with bitter resignation of Jeanne retaken--but what of Enjolras? Nothing. The Rue de la Chanvrerie seems almost forgotten. Combeferre has read the lists of the dead until the names echo in his brain at night. His dead friends are on the list. His surviving friends are not on the list.

Enjolras is dead as far as he knows. Enjolras is not on the list.

Combeferre does not choose to investigate. Were the ground to vanish beneath him, he would not choose to fall--these things are not choices. He hurls himself at the question with an involuntary focus that feels like madness.

Why is Enjolras not on the list?

Combeferre makes not quite no money at all translating texts from the handful of languages he can read. He learned most of them to follow foreign medical journals he no longer follows. The work engages none of his higher faculties, which is why he took it.

It is not quite enough to live on, he finds, so he steals out certain evenings to a particular corner of a cheap cafe. A man must not starve. He offers free literacy instruction there. He keeps his body from starving by the translating, and he keeps whatever remains of his soul from starving by that.

There must be light, after all. That is the last thing he knows for certain.

After the hours reading and writing and poring over shoddy dictionaries he would once have amended but now only frowns at, Combeferre gets to work. If there is anything on earth he is good at, it is research.

There must be light. And the last light Combeferre can imagine is that maybe, in some impossible place yet unimagined and undiscovered, Enjolras lives.

\--

_November, 1826_

The first time Combeferre saw Enjolras was across the Place du Panthéon in the early morning twilight, breaking a man's nose with his fist. Enjolras had three assailants, dogs ringing a lion, and he fought alone. 

One of the men laughed, jeering. "Why, mademoiselle--"

That was the last thing he said before the fist.

The square was chilly in the indistinct gloom, deserted but for Combeferre and the fighters. Combeferre checked his watch. He still had an hour before clinic. It would take most of that time to reach the Necker, which had been his intention. The Hôtel-Dieu was only ten minutes' walk, but being so close to the Latin Quarter, it would be mobbed. Sometimes nearly a hundred students walked through the wards together, straining over each other's heads, trying to hear the instructor. He would need to arrive early if he hoped to see anything, and his chances of examining patients would be slim even then.

He paused in the shadows beside the Pantheon's marble steps, watching the fight and considering. A more reckless man would have joined. A more prudent one would have left. Combeferre sat down on the cold steps and kept watching.

All his sympathies were with the lone figure, of course, a young man hardly more than a boy, tall, with light-colored hair flying, his temple dark with blood, and the skirt of his coat billowing as he spun to face his attackers. Two of the men wielded canes; the young man fought with fists only. By rights he should have dropped under the first blow. Instead, he held them off singlehandedly for a quarter of an hour while Combeferre looked on.

Combeferre had been too often in the young man's place not to sympathize. He had been in it too often to voluntarily return.

In the end, of course, one of the assailants finally landed the right blow, and the young man dropped on his face on the cobbled pavement. They kicked him a few times and cudgeled him with their canes, but Combeferre chose that moment to rise and approach. His hat was straight, and his coat was straight, and he gave the pavement authoritative taps with his boot heels, like a gentleman who dreads no jeering students. He regretted he carried no cane himself, that dual implement of social status and physical threat, but it was too easy to misplace in the rush between clinic, lectures, lessons, visits to the library, dissections, and rounds, and anyway, he too often went home with his arms full of books.

He came with the rising sun behind him, for he had judged his seat carefully. The shadows and the backlight meant they could not see his coat was old, they could not see--anything to make them judge him another target. He dreaded nothing, and if he happened to see three men beating a man on the ground, certainly he would call upon the police without fear. Certainly he was the sort of respectable gentleman the police listened to. The light was behind him. They could not tell otherwise.

The men looked up at the sound of Combeferre's footsteps. Men are stubborn while the fight rages and the blood is hot, but your garden-variety coward is less sanguine about being discovered kicking his fallen victim. One grabbed another by the arm and shouted something, and there was an endless moment's suspense as to whether they would flee or attack. Combeferre strode towards them, neither slackening his pace nor speeding it.

They fled.

Only when they had vanished down a side street did Combeferre run to the young man's side.

Improbably, the young man was already sitting up and feeling his jaw with a grimace, working it back and forth to make sure nothing was broken. He raised his eyebrows as Combeferre dropped to his knees. Combeferre had a distant impression of a face of improbable, supercilious beauty--but his concerns were medical ones. The man's cold expression said he was perfectly aware Combeferre had watched without helping. How he noticed in the fray, Combeferre could not imagine.

"Look up," Combeferre said, and he held up a finger. The young man lifted eyes dark blue under the dawn-white sky. His pupils dilated equally and tracked the motion. "Pain?"

He gave Combeferre a long, cool stare that conveyed with elegant precision how absurd the question was. Purple was blooming over the pale skin of his jaw, and blood ran down his temple, matting his hair. A little more blood crusted at the corners of his lips.

"No," he said.

He got up, and Combeferre followed. The young man gathered his satchel and the law books that had fallen from it, limping but refusing to take Combeferre's arm. They made their slow way to the steps beneath the colonnade, where the man dropped to rest. Combeferre sat a few feet away.

When he had leisure to look beyond the medical questions, it struck Combeferre that the men, though monstrous, had been correct. The face and figure were lanky and angular enough nearly to pull it off, but not entirely.

The young man was a woman in man's clothing.

Illegal without a permit, preposterous, and not accomplished particularly well--no wonder they had singled her out. But for a large and burly man to hold his own against three assailants for so long would have been impressive. For a youth it was almost unthinkable. For a woman--

The low sun was just beginning to creep between the columns and down the steps, and it glowed on the vellus hair of her cheek like an aureole. The law school did not admit women, which meant she was hiding this. To get this far, she must have forged paperwork, broken multiple laws, and renounced more than Combeferre could imagine. She was risking imprisonment for an education when most students of Combeferre's acquaintance could barely be bothered to show up to class.

"May I give you a piece of advice, mademoiselle?"

A hard line formed with the clenching of the bruised jaw. "I am a man. You will address me as one, or you will go away."

"Monsieur, then."

"Well?"

"Shave."

The man--for Combeferre had agreed to that stipulation, nonsensical as it was--straightened slowly and flexed his bloodied hands against the thighs of his trousers. Maybe it was a gesture of calming himself. Maybe it was a gesture of preparing himself for another fistfight. Combeferre waited.

"Why?" He bit out the word with a hard look, like this was a test Combeferre might pass, or more likely, fail.

"You're young, but you're not young enough for your cheeks to be as downy as they are."

"Ah."

The man stared out across the square, cold as the marble figures in the shadowy bas-relief high above them. Some moments' icy silence elapsed, and Combeferre grew by degrees uncomfortable.

"Or perhaps I overstep," he added.

A pale eyebrow rose fractionally. "Perhaps."

"I apologize."

The man turned to regard him, and his stern gaze seemed almost to glow. It put Combeferre in mind again of a lion, or perhaps the sun. The man held out his hand.

"Enjolras."

"Combeferre," Combeferre said, and shook it.

"Since you have begun, however," Enjolras said. "What else?"

He turned his face for Combeferre to examine. Combeferre considered in silence.

Enjolras was lucky, in his way. He was tall, even for a man. His eye commanded a withering glance; his full lips were severe. His face had the sharp harmony of the marble busts of antiquity. If not for the modern frock coat and the blood, Combeferre might have half-fancied him escaped Galatea-like from among the statues within the Pantheon.

"Hairline," Combeferre said. "Especially the temples." He touched his own whiskers. "It should transition to the coarser hair of a beard. Yours tapers into wisps, like women's hair."

"False whiskers and spirit gum should not be difficult."

"The boyish look suits you--a mere rearrangement of the hair might suffice. I fear false hair could look--"

"Like flax glued on the face of a child. I am aware of it."

His bitterness made Combeferre fall silent.

The morning's first students, professors, and workmen were trickling through the courtyard. The noise and the brightening daylight reminded Combeferre of the hour. His early start had slipped away, and he was certain to be trapped in the back. It was time to leave.

"You are a student?" he asked.

"Law."

"Medicine. Your first year?"

Enjolras's mouth tightened, and he did not deign to respond. It was, then.

There was a mystery here, Combeferre felt, in this apparent woman who claimed to be a man. Oh, perhaps there really was some mundane explanation: a high-spirited whim, a desire to learn unencumbered, flight from unwanted marriage--nothing so grand as to flip the world on its head.

But Enjolras's vehemence did not, to Combeferre's ear, bespeak fear of being caught. It seemed something more desperate and wild. Combeferre sensed dimly a wrinkle in the order of natural law, and he never looked away from that. On meeting a fact that could overturn the universe, how could one not wish to know?

"Why do you do it, monsieur?" he asked quietly.

Enjolras's thin figure went taut as strung wire. "Say what you mean."

"Well. Dress as a man."

"Why do _you_ dress as a man?" Enjolras snapped.

Speaking metaphorically, it is a different moral act to strike a man than it is to strike a man where he is wounded already. No doubt Enjolras felt the same way. No doubt Combeferre, having asked first, was highly at fault.

Even so.

Combeferre's paternal grandmother had been a slave in the colony of Saint-Domingue. His grandfather sold her but kept her son, and having no other heirs, he had the boy educated in France. As an adult, Combeferre's father had spent the bulk of his blood-soaked inheritance trying to learn his mother's whereabouts, or the whereabouts of any family still living. He traveled back to search, to the bloody tumult of newborn Haiti and to Caribbean islands where slaves had not won their freedom. He made forays into the vastness of the ever-slaveholding United States, where a free man of color is viewed with far more suspicion than in France--what hope had he there? He spent much of Combeferre's childhood overseas, but he never learned anything. He lived until the day he died under the shadow of that horror.

People are cruel even in France. For Combeferre's own part, there was no academic record he could achieve so perfect other students would stop implying him to be less human than themselves.

Combeferre's face showed no expression. He was well-practiced in that. He rose. "I hope I have been of some assistance. Good day."

He strode away across the square.

Rapid footsteps echoed behind him, and a moment later Enjolras fell into step at his side. Whatever bruising Enjolras's ankle had undergone, it seemed, unfortunately, to be not that bad. Combeferre would have had to jog to lose him, which would have marred his dignity and probably still not have worked.

"Monsieur," Enjolras was saying, "I did not mean to say--"

"I trespassed first," Combeferre said without turning, "for which I apologize. No more need be said."

"Please stop walking."

They had turned onto a narrower street and reached the shadow of a building, cold and damp-smelling from the night. Combeferre stopped and waited, expressionless.

"I know what I said." Enjolras gazed at him with earnest conviction, like he meant to make this right. "It was the answer I would have given any man who asked, but that is no matter--it was you to whom I spoke, and what I said was obscene. Monsieur Combeferre, I apologize. It will not happen again."

It was not clear to Combeferre why they should salvage a relationship born half-strangled. He was offended at Enjolras's blunders and mortified at his own. The whole thing was intolerable.

Enjolras bowed. "That is all I wished to say. I wish you good--"

"Wait," Combeferre said.

When Combeferre said nothing else, Enjolras turned a little aside, looking down the street towards the busy thoroughfare. Combeferre folded his arms and frowned up at the gray masonry and the sky beginning to blush with blue. He scrutinized everything Enjolras had said and everything he himself had said. He neither hurried nor hesitated.

A gaggle of young men streamed past in a tumult of laughter and noise, and Combeferre and Enjolras stepped to the wall. A few men jeered at them, and one swung his heavy satchel with feigned casualness as he passed, barely missing them. Out of the corner of his eye, Combeferre saw Enjolras silently adjust his stance and ready his fists. Combeferre knew such precautions well, though he generally hid them better. When they were alone again, he met Enjolras's eyes.

 _"Vir_ and _homo,"_ he said quietly. "The world impugns your maleness and my humanity. I should not have assumed I had a right to your answer. I apologize as well."

On Enjolras's face dawned a slow, startled smile. It was the most alarming smile of Combeferre's life.

When Enjolras smiled, all that cold marble became breathtaking. His radiance had an almost physical force, of propulsion and forward rush. It felt like a river sweeping on towards Niagara or the steam locomotives Combeferre had read about, hurtling into the future with a force that could crack the world.

"Let me buy you a drink," Enjolras said.

Combeferre snorted. "You're aware it's barely morning."

"Coffee, then."

Such was his power that Combeferre, who was going to have to sprint to avoid missing clinic, who had lectures and rounds all morning and after that lessons and dissection and studying and half a dozen books to read and a lecture on geology he planned on attending if he possibly could and another on mathematics he hoped to catch at least part of, forgot all of it for an instant as he teetered on the brink of agreeing. He was never going to play truant. But he wanted to.

"Tonight," he said, barely. "Buy me a drink tonight."

\--

Walking the long, vaulted wards between the rows of beds, struggling to hear the instructor from the back of the crowd of young men, Combeferre began to think his early morning encounter absurd. Agreeing to meet Enjolras had been a mistake. It would not go well. It had not even gone well that morning. He hardly knew what madness had made him say yes.

It never went well.

As far back as Combeferre could remember, he had alienated every person with whom he had ever earnestly spoken. He loved too many subjects and knew too much about all of them. He grew heated elucidating details and the connections between details, the minutiae no one cared about that transformed the heart of the thing. Details are never small. It is only the minds of men that summarize in broad strokes what they cannot comprehend.

He would get too engrossed to modulate how much he was talking, and there are limits to what people tolerate. He learned to throttle himself with succinctness. By crafting the perfect sentence, he stoppered the torrent of words.

That is to say, he only ever spoke too little or too much.

Combeferre spent the day in dread. When the time came, he went to the appointed cafe. The dread lasted him through the door, up a staircase, past candlelit tables full of the hum of men conversing. The dread intensified when he sighted the back of Enjolras's frock coat and blond head. Enjolras gazed abstracted at the table and his untouched glass of wine. Combeferre approached.

Enjolras turned and smiled, and the dread eased a little. Combeferre pulled out the other chair and sat, and it began.

Enjolras was a torrent of words without restraint. He awed Combeferre with his brilliance, his hope, and his passion sharp and clear as chiseled ice and catching as forest fire. When, haltingly, blushingly, Combeferre allowed himself to speak, Enjolras did not look annoyed.

He looked spellbound.

Talking to Enjolras, one felt the French Revolution was only caught in a momentary lull, like an eddy in a river. That night, Combeferre felt the roar of the surrounding current and the inevitability they would reenter it. He wanted that as much as Enjolras did. He agreed about oppression, injustice, and tyranny--but he could not condone war.

The work of his life was saving lives, not cutting them short. He contested the point. They could not agree.

Long after midnight, when the room was near deserted and most of the candles were extinguished, when the cafe staff were sweeping the floor and the last patrons were hauling themselves up and stumbling outside, Combeferre said what he had to say. The heaviness in his chest was not only the weight of truth. This had been the best conversation of his life. All the missteps of the morning had not ended their incipient friendship.

This would.

Combeferre straightened his shoulders and sat back in his chair, gazing into Enjolras's ardent, eerie eyes.

"The good must be innocent," he said. "I can fight with fists when I must. I will never touch a gun. And if that means--what I suppose it means." He shrugged and gazed at the table. "You should know I enjoyed talking with you very much."

Enjolras leaned nearer, close enough to make Combeferre look up. His eyes were half lit in the uncertain candlelight, one a light, leonine gold and the other gray with shadow. He stared into Combeferre's face.

"People are already dying," he said. "The difference between the deaths of the poor and the deaths of the brave is that ours win a future where they need not die. I fight for a world that has no place for men of violence and therefore no place for me. I live with my eyes dazzled by the coming dawn. How could I fail to esteem a man who sees past me to the broad day?"

The brilliance of his smile hurt Combeferre's eyes.

\--

_June, 1832_

Enjolras has watched it all unfold, all the versions, the good ends and the bad, the outcomes of all the maneuvers on his side and theirs. He has seen the end of the story where the people rise and the end where they do not. The lives of the best men he has ever known are at stake, and he holds the terrible weight of that, always.

They have pledged themselves to it. By their lives or deaths the sun will rise, if not today, then tomorrow, if not tomorrow, thereafter.

On that rainy morning, he believes they might dismantle tyranny. Men, women, and children flow into the funeral procession around him. With every street, more come. He feels the people rising like a flood to break the flimsy bulwarks constructed against the future. He is only a drop of water in that tide--they all are. Drops of water do not fear to die. And if the stone hand of monarchy crushes this rebellion, the reverberation of his death will echo. One day there will be other drops of water but the same flood.

When the pistol shot recoils up his arm and Le Cabuc falls dead begging for mercy, death becomes the only end. Summary execution has no place in the future he fights for, and neither does the man who performed it. It was necessary, but it can never be right. He surveys the stain on their enterprise with sorrow, but the death to which he condemns himself is a smaller matter. It will not hold the future back nor dim the light he sees.

It is different when they start to die.

Enjolras stops thinking then, he does what is needed, he loses himself in perfect action and frenzied movement and the maps of tactical positioning in his head. He does not look down. He looked down once, and he saw the child Gavroche looking up dead, and--he does not look down.

At last he stands backed against the crumbling plaster in a corner of the upstairs room, alone against the soldiers. Their bayonets are bright and sharp in the dim light through the distant window. He flings away the stump of his carbine and folds his arms.

"Shoot me."

As the soldiers ready their weapons, he does not think of the faces of his friends. Dawn must come, if not today--of course he thinks of them. They are clearer in his mind's eye than the soldiers. All else is dark. He made of their meeting place an abattoir. He raises his chin and stares into the face of death and waits.

"Long live the Republic!" cries a voice. "I belong to it."

Enjolras turns.

It is Grantaire, the bitter drunk. Grantaire, who only ever came to mock him. Grantaire, who claimed in the same breath to believe in nothing but Enjolras and to doubt Enjolras's literal existence. With a perversity bordering on vengeance, Grantaire sensed the light Enjolras saw in him and set himself to disproving it. He was successful. Enjolras all but gave up on him long ago.

Grantaire reaches Enjolras's side. "Two at one shot," he says to the soldiers.

He turns to Enjolras, and his smile is the gentlest thing Enjolras has ever seen. Because Grantaire in the moment it matters is extraordinary, Enjolras will not die in the cold and dark. He will die beside his last friend, remembering dawn.

"Will you permit it?" Grantaire asks.

Enjolras clasps his hand, and Grantaire's face is suffused with a wholeness Enjolras has never seen there. Enjolras thinks about the people he loves, Grantaire among them. All their memories are made of light. A death like this is a gift he did not look for. A death like this is a gift.

The report resounds. Grantaire hits the wall and slides down it, leaving a long, dark stain. Enjolras remains standing, unmarked, still breathing, his smile not yet finished.

The sun he spent his life following winks out. The tomb flooded with dawn slams shut in his face. On its door are the names graven in marble of everyone he ever loved.

Leaders are useful. The officer decided to take him for questioning.

He does not fight. He hardly knows what is happening. The realization he is not shot strikes with bewildering violence; he is stupefied and stupid with it. His body is tensed for the impact of bullets.

He is led past corpses. The faces are not accusing. They are not anything. There are no more meanings. He glimpses Courfeyrac laid out, limp and motionless. He sees Combeferre, empty and bloodless and soaked in blood.

He must pass scenes after that. He sees nothing.

He never imagined outliving them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Let's see...
> 
> "Believe in nothing but Enjolras ... doubt Enjolras's literal existence" is my read of that untranslatable wordplay in "You believe in nothing/I believe in you." (ie, that Grantaire is both sincerely saying he believes in Enjolras and mockingly addressing him as if he is an inanimate object, like a statue.)
> 
> For a great discussion of how Grantaire is messing around grammatically in that sentence, see https://just-french-me-up.tumblr.com/post/138296976671/je-crois-%C3%A0-toi-vs-je-crois-en-toi
> 
> I can be found on tumblr: @everyonewasabird


	2. The Revenants

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Content note: racism, death mention, injury mention, grief, brief swearing)

_November, 1832_

Combeferre sits in a shadowy corner at the back of the long, crowded room. He wears an old green coat he purchased off a rag seller and which he will discard in an alley before he reaches home. He has cultivated a mustache and small beard these last weeks, and he will shave them tomorrow. The hesitancy in his step and the tremor in his hand are not so easily put aside, and he fears they will mark him. He wishes being a man of color were not so conspicuous. He wishes he could leave off his glasses, for people remember the glasses. But he needs to see. 

He should not be here. He cannot be anywhere else.

The people who crowd his view mutter and rustle. All is dark but the very front of the room, where Combeferre's eyes are fixed. 

The man on the bench sits with his head bowed, his hair shorn, his face pinched and unsmiling. He is a small man, made smaller by long illness. Combeferre gazes a long time before he can believe it is Courfeyrac.

Courfeyrac's trial begins.

It is lucky Combeferre has no role in it, for his much-lauded wits have deserted him. He barely follows the proceedings, and the arguments not at all. A life in prison is under consideration, and so are the galleys. The guillotine is not out of the question.

Courfeyrac never raises his head. Others speak for him.

One can detect in Courfeyrac's features generations of ancestors from Spain, Africa, and the Mediterranean as well as climes more northerly--and that matters today, or it might. His curly hair is something lighter than black, and he freckles in summer; his face confuses white Parisians in a way Combeferre's never has. On good days, the men charged with keeping the peace do not know what to make of Courfeyrac and pass him by, like tigers intent on easier prey. On bad days, particularly when insurrection boils, they rescind the benefit of their doubts.

Combeferre prays for a good day.

Monsieur de Courfeyrac stands to speak, as sartorially polished as ever his son has been. He is fairer than Courfeyrac, and that also may matter. His money and his old name certainly do. His round, florid face is creased with the same terror that crushes Combeferre.

"... Fell under evil influences as a very young man," de Courfeyrac says, with a plaintiveness that is nothing like him. "... Always good to me, a good brother to his sisters ... such a shame to cut short a life so promising ... these regicides, you know ..."

In truth, de Courfeyrac's sympathies run left of the prevailing winds. He would say anything to save his son. Combeferre, second among the evil influences, begrudges him nothing.

The lawyers speak--and today, they are respectful. Even the prosecuting attorney with his flowery nonsense is polite. The heckling of the crowd is subdued, even here in the back.

Courfeyrac always made too much of that ridiculous "de," and this, perhaps, is the proof: eschewing it did not erase the advantages of his background. These trials have not been lenient to men of lesser family and fortune, and if Combeferre had found himself on that bench--well. The probability of the guillotine or the galleys would have risen considerably.

Combeferre believes in fair trials with all his heart, and still he bargains with any stray god that may be passing he will never disparage Courfeyrac's advantages again if they mean he walks free.

The closing arguments are made. When they ask Courfeyrac if he wishes to speak, he shakes his head.

Combeferre struggled to recognize him all trial, but he knows that headshake. It is nothing, just one of the little gestures peculiar to a friend. Suddenly, the man on the bench is Courfeyrac.

The judge deliberates.

Combeferre bows his head and shuts his eyes. He does not know what he believes in. He has not prayed in years. When he looked up into the sky that day he never thought to ask for anything. This time, he asks for everything.

An eternity later, the judge rises. Maybe de Courfeyrac was convincing, or his connections were, or, very likely, his money was. It is determined Courfeyrac was a nice young man led astray.

Courfeyrac is set free.

Combeferre keeps sitting with his head bowed as the court slowly clears, listening to the shuffle of feet and the murmuring voices. This is not a strategy for concealment. He is not capable of standing. There is no name for the feeling in him. It is too big to have a name.

\--

Combeferre makes his way out of the courthouse eventually, trailing the last of the crowd. Across the square he sees the de Courfeyrac family carriage. The door is open as they embark. Combeferre watches from atop the courthouse steps.

Courfeyrac is lost to sight among the puffed sleeves and bonnets of his three sisters, who cannot let go of him. The sisters are weeping and so is de Courfeyrac, who sobs into a handkerchief and touches the heads of each of his children over and over as if confirming and reconfirming he has them all.

Combeferre stares at the spot long after the carriage is gone.

The autumn chill wins at last. He bows his head and makes his slow way down the steps, leaning heavily on his cane.

When he is a few blocks from the courthouse, a hesitant step falls in beside him, punctuated by the tap of a cane more fashionable than his. A small, dark man with a round, pleasant face, glossy black hair, and an impeccable coat scans Combeferre's face anxiously, trying to read the answer there.

Combeferre takes Joly's arm. "Free," he says. "Entirely."

"Free. _Free?_ My God, Combeferre. After Jeanne--"

"I know."

"Come to the house." Joly skips in front of him and walks backwards, beaming. "Bossuet and Musi haven't seen you in ages. We need to celebrate!"

"Not tonight, I think."

Joly frowns as he continues walking backwards, apparently puzzling over what to do about Combeferre.

"Wine shop. My treat. You're not turning that down, I'm not letting you."

Combeferre smiles. "Very well."

\--

Joly has told Combeferre the story of how he and Bossuet lived so many times Combeferre knows it like catechism.

Joly woke concussed but not much wounded in the basement of the Corinth as the last insurgents were being rounded up and shot. He spied Bossuet, lacerated all over and semi-conscious, and he dragged him to the trapdoor that led into the cellar, where they fell headlong.

The cellar was empty, the barrels having been taken for the barricade. But no one ever fully cleans out a cellar--certainly, hurried insurgents don't. In the thin light from the trapdoor and one high, small window, they could see broken barrels and some boards propped against one wall. By the opposite wall, the floor was rubble-strewn and made uneven by flooding from the street above. Men's shouts came through the trapdoor, approaching. Bossuet lunged for the boards and barrels, Joly for the uneven floor, but they were holding hands.

There was a brief tug of war.

Joly won.

They ran for the unevenness and rubble. They found the dirt floor had eroded along the wall, leaving a narrow ditch. It was half-filled with water from yesterday's rain, but it was wide enough for a man to lie on his side, and long enough for two. Joly took sudden fright he would catch something far worse than his cold--Bossuet pushed him to lie in the cold water and followed him down. Joly seemed compelled to whisper something about influenza. Bossuet clamped a hand over his mouth. They clutched each other, lying head to head, hardly breathing in a little trench so shallow their shoulders and hips protruded above the level of the floor.

Light beamed in from above. Fleeing insurgents fell through the trapdoor. Soldiers dropped in after the fugitives and ran them through with bayonets. The soldiers searched the cellar. Joly and Bossuet listened to them kick aside the boards and bayonet the fragments of casks. The soldiers raised a lantern.

Cellars are full of unreliable shadows, and lantern light flickers. Soldiers mopping up failed revolutions are busy, perhaps too busy to traverse every wall of a clearly empty room. The soldiers ascended from the cellar. The trapdoor slammed.

When night fell, Joly and Bossuet ventured from the bullet-riddled wine shop and found the streets surrounded. They spied a sewer grating over by the little barricade, by the body of a dead girl they did not know.

They peered just enough over the little barricade to see bayonets glitter in the gloom beyond. They crouched and stared down through the rusted bars into the stinking black of the sewer.

Joly laughed, in a whisper, but with real joy. "Yes! You cad bake it out. Go!"

Bossuet did not smile. "Not like that," he said.

"Kiss Busichetta for be. Tell her I--"

"Jolllly."

Joly's smile faded. "I caddot. You dow I caddot."

They sat down together on the paving stones with their backs against the little barricade, starving, injured, and dehydrated as well as chilled and wet. Joly talked of miasma and disease and noxious effluvia. He talked of suffocation and drowning. He described in excessive medical detail the cholera epidemic then ongoing and its probable impact on the sewers. He talked of getting lost. He propounded a theory that man needs sunlight to live, and trapped beneath the earth he would wither away. And infection! He spoke a lot about infection. Then he explained how the magnetic fields of the earth were disrupted if you went under it, and who knew what that might do? They sat in a little shadow, and they sat most of the night. Joly talked, and Bossuet waited.

Dawn was breaking. It became clear at last to Joly there was only one thing worse than catching all the diseases of Paris, and that was Bossuet being caught and killed.

He made a small, defeated noise.

Bossuet undid his cravat and tied it around Joly's eyes. "We're going for a walk down the street. You'll have my hand to follow, you won't have to look, and you can't breathe through your nose as it is."

"I suppose dot."

They descended into the sewer. They were feverish, wounded, exhausted, and dying of thirst already. Bossuet led Joly by the hand through the stinking, mapless dark.

"It's a spring day," Bossuet said. "We're walking in the Luxembourg. There are flowers everywhere. Do you hear the birds? Two pretty girls are walking up ahead, arm in arm, showing a little more leg than their mamas would like. I think one is looking your way--no! I'm sure she is."

Perhaps the secret is that Bossuet's bad luck has only ever been bad instincts, and when it comes to Joly and Musichetta his judgment is better. Or perhaps it is that all the bad luck of Bossuet's life was prepayment for that night.

They made it out.

Combeferre thinks the thing that shattered for everyone at the barricade broke in their favor. Yes, there were bad months, Joly tells him. Bossuet's wounds grew infected. He raved with fever, and they were not sure he would live. For weeks Joly bathed constantly, sometimes entire days, scrubbing his skin until the water turned red, asking everyone he met whether they smelled the muck still on him. He tells this with a laugh, now.

But they stopped pretending. They stopped pretending Bossuet was only staying at Joly's for the next week or so while he got back on his feet. It had, after all, been five years of such weeks. They stopped pretending nobody was going to marry Musichetta, and they married Musichetta, Joly legally, Bossuet ceremonially. They claim they flipped a coin for it.

Joly, five years younger than Combeferre and an incalculable amount less studious, is speeding ahead of him in his medical career. He runs a clinic and sometimes cajoles--or convinces; he is less childlike than he used to be--Combeferre to assist him.

"Keep your hand in the game," he says. "How else will you know when you're ready to come back?"

Because of this, Combeferre still sees Joly.

He has stopped visiting the house to see the other two. They have built their happiness by force of will, and he is a specter among them. Musichetta, voluble, indomitable, the strongest personality in that house by far, turns silent and unsmiling in Combeferre's presence. She never asks him to leave, but he feels her relief when he goes.

They have had too much haunting. They do not need more.

\--

Combeferre and Joly settle with their drinks in a warm corner of the noisy room. Combeferre polishes the steam off his glasses while Joly tells him the news of the clinic and his family.

"I'm very glad you were there," Joly says. "We wanted to go, but we didn't quite--" He shakes his head. "But how is he? Did you get much time to talk?"

Combeferre sits silent, searching for an explanation that is not merely an excuse.

"Ah," Joly says, with a small smile. "Does this mean I don't have to pretend to like the beard?"

"Nor the coat."

"I was growing fond of the coat! It's like a new era. How many years have you had the brown one?"

"It would not have been good for either of us. To be seen together. Not there."

"I know. I hate going anywhere official associated with any of us. I get hives, and I'm sure it's a sign of something worse. Back in June we heard Jehan's mother was near nervous collapse because they were asking her to come identify him. You know how she was about death already, and I can't imagine--so I did it."

Everything in Combeferre goes cold. Joly's voice fades into the background roar of the wine shop. He sees Joly touch his arm and does not feel it.

He shakes it off after a moment. The room returns to normal. He picks up his wine, sips it, puts it down.

"We know, then."

"Know--"

Combeferre is not looking at Joly. He is looking carefully ahead at the wall. Joly starts back with such wide-eyed horror Combeferre does not manage to miss it.

"Oh, _Combeferre."_

"It is only," Combeferre says, examining the smoke stains on the plaster, "that records can be mistaken. I never saw the body."

Joly lays both hands on Combeferre's arm where it rests on the table and squeezes tight. "I did," he says. "We know."

Combeferre nods.

\--

_December, 1832_

Courfeyrac answers none of the letters Combeferre writes to him at his family home. At last, one arrives to say he has taken new rooms in Paris, and would Combeferre care to come visit? 

Though Combeferre's step is surer now, running is not yet within his capabilities. Even so, he manages something close to running.

\--

Courfeyrac is too pale, and the smile he gives Combeferre is barely a shadow of his old one. Combeferre cannot speak. He shuts the door behind him and embraces Courfeyrac and--

It would be absurd to say this is the moment he knows something has broken. Everything has been broken longer than he can fathom.

It is the moment he knows Courfeyrac has broken.

Courfeyrac with his bright laugh and bottomless generosity and absurd teasing and his soul that resembles some herding dog hellbent on making sure everybody on earth is all right, Courfeyrac who melted in the embrace of a friend like it was the best thing in the world--Combeferre's instincts are not what they once were, but he knows instantly that man is not here.

The man Combeferre embraces is gaunter than his well-cut coat makes him look. The bony shoulders beneath Combeferre's hands are tensed in rigid peaks, hard and unyielding. Combeferre hangs on longer than he should, and nothing melts.

Courfeyrac laughs, pats Combeferre's back, and steps away, beginning to talk about his plans for decorating the place.

All is still trunks underfoot and misplaced furniture. The rooms came furnished, Courfeyrac says, but he plans to make changes in the decor. He sounds cheerful about the changes, or at least he laughs a lot. He pours them both glasses of wine, and over the course of Combeferre's first glass, he finishes the bottle. His well of cheery and irrelevant anecdotes seems inexhaustible.

It should be charming, and it is not. The two of them used to be good at silence. Combeferre loved their silences. When they talked, they could talk about anything.

A few times, Combeferre tries speaking of his researches into the fate of Enjolras. When he does, Courfeyrac's anecdotes become cheerier and louder, trampling him into silence with desperate gaiety.

Combeferre takes his leave several hours and too many glasses of wine later, sick with an obscure sorrow. Courfeyrac does not walk him to the door--it is not clear he can. But he looks up suddenly from the chair where he sits.

"Combeferre? Move in with me."

"Yes," Combeferre says. "When?"

"Tomorrow?"

Combeferre vacates his mother's rooms the following day.

\--

There is too much wine, even for Courfeyrac. There are too many girls, even for Courfeyrac. There are enough girls he mixes up their names, and he does it often.

Courfeyrac, who never forgot anybody's name.

He jokes, but his jokes can be cruel. He throws himself into frivolity with an empty wildness. He no longer notices whether anyone is all right.

Combeferre used to argue with Enjolras like it was a competitive sport, but he cannot remember having with Courfeyrac anything harsher than a lively debate or a thoughtful airing of concerns. They shout now. Combeferre finds himself voicing monstrous sentiments he never espoused in his life. Over time they replace shouting with nasty silences. These beautifully appointed rooms feel like a battlefield, except on the battlefield they were on the same side.

Why are they fighting? Combeferre hardly knows.

By the Pontmercy wedding, which Courfeyrac attends and Combeferre does not, they are barely speaking. By the end of February, Combeferre moves out.

He finds his own place, dark and cramped, far out past the Salpêtrière and almost to Bicêtre, where the air is noxious with fumes from the textile factories. The guillotine was relocated here a year ago and tastefully hidden behind some elms, for such is the regime they live under. Come the heat of summer, his rooms will no doubt smell of death. And still it is a relief to live alone.

It is March now. March of last year was the worst month of Combeferre's life, save for that April and then that May; what June was cannot be quantified. He longs to tell Courfeyrac of it, now that he might begin to find the words. But the one who returned is not Courfeyrac. Combeferre cannot talk to him.

They fall out of touch. Combeferre spends the next months in terror, for he has seen the chasm yawning under Courfeyrac's laughter.

There is nothing he can do.

\--

_May, 1833_

"She's still nauseated so often," Joly says. "That can't be right, can it?"

Combeferre is smiling; Joly looks terrified. They sit in the consulting room in the back of Joly's clinic, after hours. An open bottle of champaign and two glasses sit on the exam table.

Combeferre is exhausted, by the work, by the hour, and because he still tires more easily than he used to. He comes here as a favor to Joly, and he does not come often.

But after closing tonight, Joly, with bright eyes and a shining face, dragged Combeferre to this room and drew a bottle of champaign from his medical bag. He had a terrified grin as he said it, and he watched Combeferre's face nervously, like the moment Combeferre heard mattered. Tired though Combeferre was, that made him happy.

"The nausea should have ended a week ago," Joly says. "All the books say so! At least, one book says so. Yes, I know it can happen this way! But she's uncomfortable, there's back pain, she's so often tired and sometimes dizzy--no, you don't have to say it, I know that too. But that doesn't mean it isn't something. It could be something, Combeferre!"

He goes on to detail all the mysterious ailments that might make a pregnant woman sick and uncomfortable. Combeferre sips his champagne and listens. He suspects he is providing a service to the rest of Joly's household by so doing--Joly mentioned that Musichetta and Bossuet placed a limit on the number of maladies he can diagnose Musichetta with per day.

It has nothing to do with Joly's skill as a doctor. It took Combeferre some years to realize that. His knowledge and judgment are sound, so long as the patient is not himself or one of his spouses. Or in future, Combeferre supposes, his child.

Joly runs out of diagnoses at last, a little out of breath.

"You know what I'm going to say."

"That it sounds normal."

Combeferre sips his champaign and smiles. "Extremely."

"I know. I'm a doctor. I _know."_

"I don't doubt it."

Joly falls silent, scratching his nose with the head of his cane. It is a nervous gesture he makes when he is thinking through something difficult. Combeferre knows instantly he will not like what is coming.

"It's doing well," Joly says. "The clinic."

"That's good to hear."

"I'm going to be even busier in a few months, what with the baby."

"I imagine so."

"I could use a partner. Someone skilled. Brilliant. Thoughtful. Who cares, and who I know I can trust."

"I'm sure you'll find someone admirably suited."

"Combeferre--"

"Joly."

Joly sighs. "If I asked why not, I don't suppose you'd--"

"No."

\--

Combeferre walks home from Joly's clinic through the long spring dusk, aching and weary.

The sky is a dark, rich blue, bluer against the red flames of the street lights. The trees overhead are snowy with flowers, the air is sweet, and moths knock against the lamps. He looks away without ascertaining what kind of moths.

Tonight was nice. It was good to see Joly and hear his news. And still, the tone of that joy feels flat and without resonance, like notes from a cracked violin.

The simile is gracelessly literal. Combeferre touches the place over his breast where even through the layers of wool and linen he feels the raised scars and the notched bone. There are three mended rents in his coat, too.

He is trying not to think of lost friends whom Joly is not.

There is an old man in the street ahead of him, walking with a slow shuffle. His coat is rough and poor, and his workman's cap is off-center on his shaggy white hair.

Six months ago, Combeferre walked in such a way. Now he will overtake the old man in a moment. The old man looks around vacantly, and his lips move in silent conversation.

Combeferre is tired. He wants to avert his eyes and and duck down some side street. The impulse is wholly unworthy of him. He keeps on as he was going.

"Monsieur," he says when he reaches the old man. The old man does not react, so Combeferre raises his voice. "Monsieur? Is there somewhere I can help you get to?"

He is old indeed, eighty or ninety at a guess, and of emaciated thinness. He has reached the point where the face shows not the days passed but the days remaining. There will not be many. He keeps shuffling forward while Combeferre follows at his side.

"Monsieur?"

The old man sees him at last and starts back in alarm, seized by disproportionate terror. He glances around like a trapped animal, never quite looking at Combeferre.

His eyes in the dimming dusk and flickering streetlight glint a tawny amber, a little lighter than his weathered face. On seeing them, something goes wrong in the region of Combeferre's chest. The flash of memory is gone in an instant, leaving him unenlightened and unsettled.

"I did not mean to alarm you, monsieur," Combeferre says. "Is there someone who will be looking for you?"

"I have no family."

"Nor friends? Is there no one I can take you home to?"

"I am very well, doctor."

He has noticed Combeferre's medical bag and ceased contemplating desperate flight. Combeferre dislikes being identified by it, but in this instance he is glad.

"May I walk you to wherever you are going?"

"No, I am not going there."

It is the most mundane thing in the world, this sad decline of age, and yet it puts Combeferre in mind of strange riddles. Prouvaire used to read fairy stories aloud late at night sometimes, when the company had dwindled and everyone was too sleepy to argue politics. That is what it makes him think of.

The memory of Prouvaire gentles him, perhaps. Combeferre finds himself matching the old man's slow shuffle with more patience.

"What is your name, monsieur?"

The old man turns away.

"What can I call you?" Combeferre waits, but he cannot outlast the old man's silence. "Monsieur?"

"I have outlived my names."

The old man looks up, and Combeferre quails again before something in his eyes. He is being absurd. There is no reason to be afraid of this fragile old man.

But the old man also starts back with sudden terror. "No," he whispers. "Please, monsieur--you cannot tell her you saw me. Let me go. You must not tell."

It is the confused fear born of senility and illness. Combeferre regards him with terrible pity. He tried to bring comfort, and he has only replaced the man's stupefaction with fear.

"Monsieur," Combeferre says, "I apologize. I never intended--"

"You described her as if you saw her," the old man whispers. "I heard you--your question of women. She was pacing in her ballgown through the snow, with her bare shoulders and her cough. I have not left her daughter so. She will be provided for, she will be safe and happy. I raised her in innocence when I hardly knew what innocence was. I leave her unshadowed by corruption or violence or guilty memory. Doctor, let me have performed that one miracle. Let me end my days having done one thing right."

This is not distracted rambling. The intangible terror that has been lingering at the edges of Combeferre's consciousness seizes him. He thinks again he knows these eyes--then he thinks he cannot possibly.

The man he remembers was decades younger than this.

He looks again. He does know the eyes. He knows the features of the face as well, though they are impossibly aged.

This is the man who stepped between bullets like a ghost, who carried the wounded one by one. This is the man who carried Combeferre to the basement of the Corinth and laid him among his friends.

Combeferre is by no means small, but this old man lifted him like a child. He looks now as if he will barely carry himself the length of this block. The barricade was less than a year ago.

It is nevertheless him.

Combeferre is not ready. For the old man's strangeness, for the memory of the barricade, for his own guilty conscience, for any of it. He listens to that weak and faltering breath and wants desperately not to be here.

He speaks almost against his will.

"I am looking for a man. Tall. Blond. The leader of the barricade. His name was Enjolras. Do you know what became of him?"

The old man's breathing is faint, with a dry rattle like dead leaves. There are moments when he seems not to be breathing at all.

Combeferre's presence disturbs him. He is only causing harm.

"I am sorry," Combeferre says, stepping back. "I will not trouble you further."

Just as he is turning away, the old man's soft voice arrests him.

"Your friend was defending the door of the cafe as the soldiers battered it down. He was yet living when I left. I cannot tell you what came after. I am sorry I know no more."

"Thank you," Combeferre says, in a voice suddenly thick. "For this--and for that day."

The old man gazes back with his unreadable amber eyes. After a moment, he raises his hand in benediction or farewell.

Combeferre bows and goes his way.

\--

As Combeferre walks on through the blue night, he thinks of Prouvaire's fairy stories.

It was rare, that reading, reserved for quiet evenings in someone's rooms after the Musain had closed. The light was dim and strange that time of night. The soberest among them were befuddled by the hour. No one was quite awake.

Bahorel would be sprawled out like a great bearskin rug, occupying an astonishing amount of floor. Feuilly had told them repeatedly he could not stay late, and with his head on his balled-up coat, he was half trying to sleep and half desperately staying awake. Courfeyrac chatted idly with everyone, and there was not one among them whom he had not on some occasion requisitioned as a pillow. Combeferre himself had long ago lost the battle to look dignified and was probably falling asleep sitting between Courfeyrac and Enjolras. If Grantaire had stayed and found any peace, it was with Joly and Bossuet, who were dozing on each other.

In the softness of the candlelight, Enjolras smiled with closed eyes, listening to them talk. Some people speculated he occasionally fell asleep that way, but one would have to be sitting beside him to know for certain.

That was Prouvaire's hour ascendant.

The more asleep they all were, the more awake Prouvaire was, sitting forward with his fine, restless hands winding and unwinding around each other. In the shifting sepia and ochre of the candlelight, his fox-red hair would be dark about his shoulders, and his eyes would gleam like pale moons. A bright silk scarf wrapped his throat. Sometimes earrings glinted in his ears.

A book would materialize in his freckled, ever-moving hand. He would draw up his thin knees and raise his scanty eyebrows and grin his charming, beautiful, crooked smile. 

He began wherever the book fell open, reading in his soft, high voice, full of meaning. All right, Combeferre would think, keeping his eyes open by force of will, fixing them with mesmeric focus upon Prouvaire's speaking lips. There must have been a prophesy at the beginning, for why else should there be seven swans? And he would catch Prouvaire's sharp grin and the sparkle in his eye, for Prouvaire knew Combeferre was the last of them still trying to make it make sense.

Later, alone, Combeferre would expound to Prouvaire his theories.

"It is rather hard of that damsel to upbraid him next morning after the castle evaporates," he recalls mumbling once, half asleep into Prouvaire's pillow. "He finds himself at a ghostly dinner with a bleeding king and shrouded vessels processing by--very well! If he asks the correct question, he heals it all in an instant, but there are too many versions of the story! How is he to know if this is the one where he must ask, 'Whom does the grail serve?' or some other? Perhaps he should say nothing, or perhaps this is the version where he must say, 'Why do you suffer--"

Prouvaire laughed and rolled over to hide his face in Combeferre's bare shoulder. He never confirmed Combeferre's theories, but they delighted him. Perhaps that was the real reason Combeferre always had one.

Combeferre reaches the battered door of his own ramshackle building. He takes a deep breath and another and another of the quiet night, for Prouvaire is dead. Most of those beloved faces are dead.

He swallows the howling emptiness in his chest and fumbles in his pocket for his keys.

\--

Combeferre receives a dinner invitation from Madame Pontmercy. He has ignored all her previous invitations and would ignore this one, except for the words added at the bottom in Courfeyrac's hand:

_Come. Please._

It is not in Combeferre to refuse that.

It is Combeferre's first time at the house, which occupies the first floor of a massive building of pale stone.

He is shown into the drawing room, where no one is present but a very old man who stares at him rheumily. The man is dressed like the preposterous ultraconservatives of forty years ago, as if some large-lapeled, lank-haired phantom escaped the _ancien régime_ to haunt Pontmercy.

The old man squints at Combeferre in expectant puzzlement while Combeferre keeps hoping this is some mad prank of Courfeyrac's. Then the old man startles and mutters something in a querulous voice about how one does one's best to keep up with the times, but my, how things change--he seems to have just realized Combeferre is a guest and not a servant. The butler announced this a few seconds ago, but either the old man is a bit deaf or he failed to believe it.

If not for Courfeyrac's note, Combeferre would leave. As it is, he bows coldly and goes to the door to wait for more congenial company. The old man attempts some smalltalk at Combeferre's back, but Combeferre is not in the mood to respond. At last, Pontmercy rushes in looking harassed.

"Courfeyrac and Cosette are in the garden," he says. "Sorry. They'll be back."

"Very well."

"I see you've met my grandfather."

"Yes."

They fall silent.

Combeferre and Pontmercy have only ever had one conversation. During it, according to Courfeyrac, Combeferre dismantled Pontmercy's entire life in two words. Pontmercy has been endeavoring ever since not to repeat the experience. Combeferre is happy enough to oblige him.

\--

Courfeyrac is smiling.

Combeferre glimpses him through the doorway and loses all awareness of the room. Pontmercy says something--Combeferre has no idea what. Courfeyrac is talking to Madame Pontmercy. There is color in his cheeks, which are fuller. His hair has grown enough to let him pomade the curls into their familiar crests and tufts. As he talks he ducks his head in that half-abashed way he does when he is teasing. Madame Pontmercy laughs.

He sees Combeferre and his smile freezes.

Perhaps he is still angry. Or perhaps, like Combeferre, he is seeing an old friend risen from the dead.

There is no way to find out. This is a dinner party, after all, where one is polite and witty and says nothing of importance. 

Courfeyrac steps cautiously into the room with his eyes on Combeferre. Madame Pontmercy rejoins her husband. Combeferre tries desperately to think of something to say.

A bell calls them to the dining room before he can.

\--

He feels like Tantalus, though it is not the food he cannot reach. 

Courfeyrac is chatting with Marius now, too far away to speak with easily. Combeferre tries making conversation with Pontmercy's elderly aunt, but she narrows her eyes like this behavior is suspicious. When Courfeyrac directs comments to him, Combeferre struggles to answer. Courfeyrac's replies to him are no more apt. Whatever they need to say cannot be said here.

He catches only fragments of conversation. Madame Pontmercy, lively and bright for most of the party, grows somber and mentions some concern about her father. Combeferre does not know the situation and feels awkward asking. Pontmercy and his grandfather assure her she need not fret about her father, and she cheers up a little. The conversation moves on.

Marius's grandfather--called Gillenormand, apparently--has dominated the conversation since the beginning, but after yet another course is cleared he begins haranguing in earnest. He decries the pointlessness of rebellions and adulates the rococo excesses of his own century. He sings the praises of wealth, silk, lace, and pretty girls, laying peculiar emphasis on the beauty of Madame Pontmercy. Both Pontmercys turn red, but no one stops him. He goes on to praise "love," which probably also means pretty girls.

As far as Combeferre is concerned, Gillenormand's real point is clear enough.

 _Enjolras was wrong,_ he is saying. _Enjolras is dead. Long live the world without him._

No one else seems to hear it.

Combeferre shows no dismay. He lays down his fork, thanks Madame Pontmercy and Pontmercy for a lovely evening, makes some smiling excuses about having to get up early, bows, and departs.

He is just stepping out the door when a hand grips his shoulder. Combeferre stops, staring down the grand candlelit stairwell. He is afraid to turn around.

"I'm sorry," Courfeyrac says. "A dinner party was entirely the wrong thing. That horrible speech--I know. I haven't forgotten."

Combeferre turns to find Courfeyrac standing in the gloomy shadows of the foyer. Courfeyrac has the most expressive face Combeferre has ever known. It was only after the barricade that it became false and strange. Courfeyrac's clear eyes are wide and earnest now, and his lip quivers.

"My God, Combeferre," he says. "This year-- _fuck this year!"_

Combeferre throws his arms around him and holds tight, talking into Courfeyrac's hair with no idea what he is saying. It is not eloquent or even sensible, and it really might be gibberish. "A dinner party. Courfeyrac, a dinner party. A dinner _\--why?"_

"I was afraid--if I asked--you wouldn't come."

"You know I'll always come!"

Some mad fit of laughter grips Courfeyrac--relief, probably. That frozen tension Combeferre once felt in him is gone. It is possible Combeferre is weeping, and it is possible he has lost all capacity to tell.

Someone within the house calls Courfeyrac's name, and Courfeyrac mutters an oath. He pulls Combeferre out onto the stairwell, shutting the door behind them. They stand embracing for a long time.

Courfeyrac draws him down the stairs into the quiet of the courtyard. Dusk is falling as they begin to talk. Combeferre hears in Courfeyrac's voice everything that used to be there: the generosity, the ridiculous teasing, and underneath it that careful listening. There are moments when it overwhelms Combeferre until he cannot speak. Courfeyrac waits for him.

They talk of what they have been doing these last weeks, of the strangeness of surviving, of this new world. They talk a little of what they lost.

Voices call from inside. Combeferre hears footsteps descending the stairs. There is muffled debate on the other side of the door--Pontmercy is going to open it. Combeferre is in no condition to be seen by Pontmercy. He starts away towards the carriage gate. Courfeyrac lays a hand on his arm.

Madame Pontmercy's voice, too soft to make out, prevails over her husband. Footsteps withdraw. Combeferre relaxes.

It is fully night. Candles light the rows of windows above them. The two of them are quiet now, in the way Combeferre always loved. He leans his back against the wall, staring out across the stone courtyard towards the dark, tree-lined garden that occupies one side of it. Courfeyrac's shoulder leans into his. The angle is bad, but if Combeferre cranes his neck right, he can look down to see the corner of Courfeyrac's smile.

There are not many people to whom Combeferre ever showed his whole heart. He learned tonight one of them is still living.

Not all the light has gone from the world, for Courfeyrac remains in it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I hope this is relatively clear, but just in case: no this is not the last we see of Jean Valjean, that would be _terrible._
> 
> I can be found on Tumblr: @everyonewasabird


	3. In Which Is Seen that Some Books in Courfeyrac's Law Library May Be Autographed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: reference to manipulation (canonical), brief swearing.
> 
> As ever, if there's anything I don't tag for that you'd like me to, please tell me!
> 
> Criticism always welcome.

_May, 1833_

Cosette remembers being small and afraid in a dark wood.

She was dragging something heavy, though she cannot now recall what it was. Her hands were frozen and her arms were tired, and cold water had splashed down her dress and over her feet. She supposes from this she must have been fetching water. She was in a terrible hurry because she believed the dark underbrush full of ghosts, and the only thing she feared more than ghosts was Madame.

Out of the darkness, a hand lifted her burden. A man walked beside her, and he took her small, chapped hand in his hand, which was huge and callused, but kind. He was strong as a bear and gentle as a lamb, and she was loved and she was safe.

For almost ten years her papa walked beside her, and then he walked away.

Cosette is surrounded by light now. She loves her husband like she loves life itself, and they live together in a fine house where there is no end of things to amuse her. She spends her days reading on antique sofas in beautiful rooms, gardening in her wonderful garden, or walking with Marius through the streets on sunny afternoons, sharing the city together.

In all these places, suddenly she will look up and it will seem the dark woods loom around her again, bewildering and strange. Her papa is gone, and he did not tell her he was going. Her papa is gone, and she does not know why.

Cosette is not a child anymore. She is not lost or hungry or afraid of every shadow, nor does she carry anything she cannot bear. She does not require a hand to reach from the darkness and lift her burden. Her papa need not carry anything now.

She only wants him here. 

\--

Cosette's father is gone, and she is at a party. Marius wants her to be happy, so she is trying to be happy.

It is a small, wonderfully homey house. The sitting room where they are gathered is a profusion of patterns and curios that should be overwhelming but in fact is charming. Cosette has so far counted three small magnets placed almost out of sight in different corners. She is dying of curiosity but has decided not to ask until she is better acquainted with her hosts. Half-hidden as the magnets are, it may be a sensitive subject.

The lady of the house--Cosette has not been able to learn her surname, and so has no idea what properly to call her--is expecting a baby. Both of the men who live here seem nervous and elated, and Cosette cannot for the life of her determine which one is her husband.

The lady of the house sits between M. Joly and M. Lesgles, telling a story Cosette is trying to follow. Marius and M. Courfeyrac attempted earlier to explain who everyone was, but it made them so sad she quickly assured them they need not trouble themselves.

"I only went over to his table!" the lady exclaims. "Was I to ignore such an old friend? I merely said, 'Discussing literature again, Jehan?' and he leaped up from where he was tete a tete with somebody--Théophile I think, it may be I still owe him an apology--and stared into my face with the most terrible look. 'Literature?' he cried. _'Literature,_ Musichetta?' the way one might say, _'et tu, Brute?'_

"Now, that never seemed fair to me. Jehan Prouvaire had his camp, and I have mine, and he can't claim the word 'literature' for his side and leave the rest of us in the cold. I suppose I was a bit put out by it, because I said--very sweetly, mind you--'Some of us ply the noble art to earn an honest living, monsieur. Others of us are poets.'

"He turned so deadly pale his freckles nearly glowed. He was shaking with fury, and he cried, "The hackneyed plots--the tired cliches! You profane the name of art!' I think Jehan never really accepted that people respect his writing but buy mine."

"Madame," Cosette manages to break in, "I did not quite catch--what is it you write?"

"Call me Musichetta, everybody does." Her dark eyes twinkle. "One might call them romances, Madame Pontmercy. But if there is a respectable kind of romance out there--rest assured I write the other kind. I follow, let us say, a more _philosophical_ tradition."

"Ah," Cosette says. She is not certain what these romances entail or what is not respectable about philosophy, and she does not quite dare to ask. She glances at Marius, but he seems equally uncomprehending.

Marius has seemed happy tonight, far too rare a thing since the barricade. He wears the pearl gray waistcoat Cosette picked out for him, and it is a lovely spot of brightness beneath his coat. She has been gradually coaxing him towards colors other than black, and they have gotten as far as gray.

Cosette had worried at the start of the evening. M. Lesgles, after welcoming Cosette warmly, inquired of Marius how he liked married life, with several broad winks to clarify his meaning. Marius turned terribly pale, which prompted M. Joly to produce a tongue depressor and try to argue Marius into letting him use it. It had taken all Cosette's conversational finesse to smooth it over, and it was all the more perilous because she was dreadfully close to giggling.

On Marius's other side sits his dear friend M. Courfeyrac, who is dressed resplendently in shades of fawn and green and laughing with the highest degree of delight. Marius always described M. Courfeyrac as a cheerful person, but Cosette had known him months before she ever saw it. He has seemed better of late, and she is glad.

"So then," M. Courfeyrac says, taking up the story with a smile, "Musichetta and Jehan began shouting at each other in the middle of the restaurant."

 _"We_ began shouting? He started declaiming in epic verse at me!"

"I think he was trying to prove it superior."

"In Italian! When he knew perfectly well not everybody received his rich boy education."

"Or paid any attention to the school they did attend," M. Lesgles adds with a knowing smile.

"Well, that too. In either event, I didn't understand a word. So naturally, I countered with a scene from my latest novel--"

"A love scene from your latest novel, Musi," M. Courfeyrac puts in.

"Pardieu! What other part is worth reciting?"

M. Courfeyrac glances around at them with sparkling eyes and a mischievous grin. "You really must picture this properly. The two of them were shouting all this literally over poor Combeferre's head. He was sinking lower and lower in his seat, like he wanted to burrow through the floor. This was back before I knew him at all well. I beckoned him over to my table, and I've never seen a man gladder to escape from poetry."

"The philistine," Musichetta says complacently. "Jean-Francois, why were you there, anyway?"

"I was your _date,"_ M. Courfeyrac cries, laughing.

"Were you really? We were still--?"

"No, you had just finished letting me down gently. Well, somewhat gently. Then you noticed Jehan having a perfectly peaceful dinner with Combeferre and decided to provoke him."

"I could hardly be expected to help it! Jehan always was such a delight to--"

Musichetta's grin suddenly falters. She gazes at the carpet with an odd, startled frown. No one speaks.

Marius's friends, for all their laughter, must be careful in telling these stories. They remind Cosette of the funambulists she has seen in the streets and parks, blithe and skillful and always one slip from an awful fall.

M. Courfeyrac recovers first, though his voice is softer now. "You know I went after you when they threw the two of you out? I was afraid you'd both be arrested."

Musichetta shakes herself and smiles at him. "My sweet, gallant knight."

"Oh!" M. Joly says. He too seems to be making an effort at cheer. "Was this the night we met, then? I always wondered what you and Jehan were being dragged out of a cafe for. And what Combeferre was doing there. And why Courfeyrac looked about to fight a waiter."

M. Lesgles, who seemed close to tears a moment ago, laughs. So does Marius, and Cosette squeezes his hand. She watches the spirits of the company gradually revive. She is glad for their joy and sorry for their grief, but she cannot think herself part of either.

She was not there. She does not know.

"Are you happy here?" Marius whispers. He is nervous for her in this company. He feared bringing her to meet them.

"Yes, my love," she whispers back.

They are lovely people, and she is happy to be here. If that is not exactly the same thing, it must surely be near enough.

\--

It was a slow receding. For nine years he was her papa, and then he was only her uncle. Soon after that, he was Monsieur Jean, a stranger who only ever called her 'madame,' except when he slipped and forgot to. It troubled him when she said she loved him, so she stopped saying it. He and Marius so wanted her to laugh and smile, so she did her best.

It hurt to love thus. She felt as if her heart were half starving. It had been a long time since she had felt that way.

She complained sometimes. She told Monsieur Jean he was being a terrible bear, that it hurt her, that she was almost afraid of him.

The papa Cosette had known would have looked stricken with horror at that. He would have sat her down beside him and taken her hand and told her gravely that he was sorry, and she was right. He would have moved earth and heaven never to frighten her again.

Monsieur Jean only looked sad and changed the subject. What was Cosette to do? She went back to laughing and prattling the way she was supposed to.

\--

M. Courfeyrac is recounting tales of their student days, from the period when Marius slept on a mattress on his floor. M. Courfeyrac mentions that he occasionally forgot this fact, but he is vague about it.

Cosette inquires further. He demurs. It perplexes her until Marius, very red, mumbles something about being trodden upon in the night by an inebriated young lady. Their hosts guffaw, and Cosette blushes.

M. Courfeyrac catches her eye across Marius and grins, though he too is rather red. "He slanders me terribly, madame. On my honor, I have only ever been a gentleman."

"I don't a bit of it slander you," Marius grumbles. "Her heels _hurt."_

"Well--you can't say we didn't try to make it up to you."

"Making it up to me would have meant leaving so I could sleep!"

"I think that became clearer to me in the morning, yes. At the time it seemed such a tragically lonely situation for you neither of us could countenance it."

"I do recall you thinking that."

"We went back to my bed as soon as you explained it. You must give us that."

"After ensuring I was never, ever going to sleep again, Courfeyrac."

"You have certainly slept since! Madame, please confirm I have not afflicted your husband to the degree he alleges."

"I have seen you sleep, my love."

"Confirmation of slander!" M. Courfeyrac cries. "From the man's wife, no less."

"Inadmissible in court," says M. Lesgles. "I don't condone the sections of the Civil Code that lay out the impossibility of a wife testifying against her husband, but skirting the issue by pretending there are no such laws--"

"Dear," the lady of the house says, and Cosette supposes from this that she must be Madame Lesgles, "if you insist on talking like a lawyer, I will flee to the kitchen and spend the evening there. Don't think I won't."

"But the chairs, Musi!" cries M. Joly. "Straw chairs are not at all the thing in your condition!"

He says it with a familiarity and distress Cosette can only imagine coming from a lady's husband. She supposes the lady must be Madame Joly after all.

\--

The furniture vanished piece by piece from the room where her papa visited her.

The room was a rough basement with a separate entrance from the rest of the house. Until her papa began coming to it, Cosette had not suspected M. Gillenormand's grand mansion had such a room. It felt like the cupboard where she used to sleep as a child, dusty and mean and full of spiders. She hated every inch of it, but it was the only room her papa would set foot in, so she loved it, too.

She thought the vanishing furniture terribly odd. The pieces had been there a long time, they were decades out of fashion, and the rest of the house did not need them. When she asked, her papa said it was because he wanted it that way.

Perhaps he did, but he looked heartbroken when he said it. And if she thinks about it too hard, she finds it very odd that Basque would have obeyed her father about furniture in M. Gillenormand's house.

Oh, she does not like the feeling she gets when she thinks about this! It is shivery and uneasy, like something is wrong with the ground under her feet or else wrong inside her head. She cannot tell which it is. She can only hope it is in her head, but that is a terrible thing to hope for.

There must be some ordinary explanation. So long as she does not think too hard, she can believe the answer is obvious and she is only too silly to realize it. Because the trouble is, when she thinks too hard, she starts to imagine--no, it does not do to dwell upon it. She only must try not to worry about her papa.

Marius has told her over and over not to worry--her father has only left on a trip. Every time she asks, he gets troubled and silent, then later he adds some fresh delight to her life to take her mind off things. This party is one such effort, and she is grateful.

She turns her attention from her dark thoughts back to this cheerful room and these nice people.

M. Courfeyrac appears to be picking a fight with Marius, grinning enormously as he does so. Marius seems torn between laughter and pain. Not even M. Courfeyrac's jokes and the hints of Marius's past can cheer her tonight, but it does not matter.

She joins in, teasing Marius exactly the right amount, deflecting where necessary, making him blush but not cringe. She asks M. Courfeyrac to elaborate on one or two points, and M. Courfeyrac's face illuminates with the joy he always gets from vexing Marius.

It is not that M. Courfeyrac is not also careful, in his way. His standards for how far to push only differ from hers. He says something mildly risqué about a stiff breeze and a young lady's ankle, and Marius buries his face in his hands. Cosette gently changes the subject. Marius acts embarrassed, but she can tell he is happy to see her animated.

She has been chatting brightly this evening, asking questions and engaging people with a skill she prides herself on. She does all these things, and her father is gone.

\--

The men fall into a discussion in which Cosette understands only enough to know the subject is law. Musichetta rises from the sofa with difficulty, muttering under her breath words Cosette cannot bring herself to believe she heard correctly.

"Kitchen," Musichetta says to Cosette.

Cosette obeys.

"Can't abide a room with too many lawyers in it," Musichetta explains when the two of them are settled on the straw chairs in the kitchen. In this little house, it is just the next room over. The talk of the men drifts through the open doorway.

The kitchen is a cheerful space, red-tiled and wobbly-tabled, with bread, eggs, cheese, vegetables, and bottles of wine congregating in cheerful disorder on all available surfaces.

M. Joly and M. Lesgles come in several times to check on Musichetta. Sometimes one takes a seat and chats for a while, and sometimes the other does.

Cosette finds a moment alone with Musichetta at last. She smiles and apologizes and begs to know which of the men is Musichetta's husband.

It must be the wrong question, for Musichetta's eyes go wide. She cranes her neck as well as she can to see the sitting room and bellows, "Courfeyrac, you son of a bitch!"

Cosette, terribly startled, wants to flee back to Marius's side. It has been years since she heard such language, and it never boded well.

M. Courfeyrac appears in the doorway before she can, looking considerably less shocked--in fact, he is smiling. Looking at his easy face, she considers Musichetta's tone and Musichetta's arch expression--irritated, but hardly dangerous--and decides she need not be quite so alarmed.

"Musi?" M. Courfeyrac asks. "Were those your dulcet tones I heard emanating faintly from afar?"

"You utter cad, did you bring her to scandalize her?"

M. Courfeyrac looks bewildered.

"She asked which one is my husband."

"She--oh."

"I trace that gross oversight to _you,_ Jean-Francois."

"I assumed Marius would have told her! Didn't Marius tell you?"

"Tell me what, monsieur? Madame?"

"Musichetta. For God's sake, call me Musichetta."

"Why didn't Marius tell you?" M. Courfeyrac winds his curly hair around his fingers, agitated. "Marius knows. He must! Mustn't he?"

"I have no idea!" Musichetta says. "I only met the man tonight, and he looks petrified every time I try to talk to him!"

"Marius!" M. Courfeyrac calls over his shoulder. "Who is Musichetta's husband?"

After a pause, Marius calls back faintly, "... Lesgles?"

There is a burst of laughter from the other room.

"What?" Cosette hears Marius demanding. _"What?"_

"Right," Musichetta says. "Jean-Francois, I'm borrowing you in case of accident. Sit there."

M. Courfeyrac sits in the free chair.

"Accident?" Cosette asks.

"Can't be too careful. Madame Pontmercy, are you inclined towards fainting? No, you don't look it. In any case, though. Well!"

Musichetta picks up Cosette's hand from the table and pats it. "Now, this will be fun."

She looks like she means it. Her grin is, in fact, a little frightening.

\--

They are both, it turns out, Musichetta's husbands.

"One may ..." Cosette says. "One may ... do that?"

Musichetta's smile is positively wolfish. "It depends on the inclination of the husbands."

"Ah," Cosette says faintly.

"I'm sorry, I really assumed Marius told you," M. Courfeyrac says, very red. "Everybody knew!"

Marius appears in the kitchen doorway, staring at Cosette like a man who has been caught in a tornado and deposited on the moon. Apparently, they have now told him too. Cosette gazes back helplessly.

"My love--" he says. Then he catches sight of Musichetta, makes an alarmed noise, and walks out again.

"I must--" Cosette says, starting to rise.

From the other room, M. Lesgles calls, "Pontmercy, get over here, you're our legal expert since you had my place at university. Come make a determination!"

"You surely mustn't," Musichetta says. "Nobody should be subjected to that conversation."

Cosette laughs in spite of herself. After a moment's hesitation, she keeps her seat.

She catches sight then of Musichetta's belly. It is by no means obvious yet, but it is free of the corset that would otherwise constrain it. Many disconcerting questions and suppositions dawn on her at once. 

"The baby--" she says, and an instant later she is mortified she said it. Musichetta's eyebrows are rising. Cosette's face burns.

She shuts her eyes. She was raised better than this. She was not born into the world she inhabits now, all respectability and manners and fashionable dress. She has gone with her father to all kinds of households. When one is disconcerted, one chooses kindness.

Her papa taught her so.

She looks up and smiles. "It will surely be an enormous relief to have three parents. Children are a delight, but as I understand it, a great deal of work."

Musichetta slams her hand on the table. "Exactly!" she cries. "It is perfectly mad more people don't do it this way!"

Cosette asks about their plans for when the baby comes, and Musichetta describes the nursery with enthusiasm, then she branches somehow into telling Cosette of her writing. Cosette understands at last what it is she writes.

Her face glows like a beacon, which seems to delight Musichetta. Perhaps it is foolish, but Cosette had not realized people could write about that. When she admits this, Musichetta laughs until she cannot breathe. She looks up at last, red-faced and wiping her eyes. Cosette, who must surely be redder, asks, shyly, what exactly happens in such a book.

Musichetta grins more alarmingly than ever and launches into explanations.

\--

Cosette has been laughing for most of an hour. Her cheeks ache, her eyes are streaming, and she has heard more about the unspeakable exploits of nuns, priests, highwaymen, and secret princes than she thought the whole of human imagination contained. Musichetta has impeccable instincts for which words Cosette has failed to understand, which is a mixed blessing, for it means she explains them. Cosette's head still whirls from some of these revelations.

She has never met a highwayman or a secret prince, but she has lived in a convent--surely none of this transpired there! That is an unwise line of thinking, for it provides faces for the stories and does nothing whatsoever to ease her blushing.

M. Courfeyrac spent the early part of the discussion very kindly not looking at her. As the direction of the conversation became clear, he excused himself and rejoined the men in the sitting room. Only after the explanations and giggling subsided did he return to the kitchen and resume his seat.

"Anyway," Musichetta says, "once we're done with all the--" She waves vaguely at her bosom, "I'll go back to my writing, Matthieu will do his doctoring, and André will do much of the child-minding during the day."

"Bossuet?" M. Courfeyrac says, sitting up. "Responsible for a child? The luck--"

"I've never known a more loving heart," Musichetta says calmly. "A child could do far worse."

Cosette thinks of her father, and her laughter of a moment ago seems suddenly as far off as some distant country. "A child could," she says quietly.

Musichetta excuses herself a moment, rising from her seat with difficulty. It seems an expecting lady must excuse herself thus rather often--there is much about the condition that seems quite trying. Cosette has never been acquainted with anyone else in it, and it is alarming how little she knows. It is a little alarming generally.

She imagines a child, though, and the thought makes her happy. Then she imagines a child never meeting her papa, and her breath catches in her chest with a horrible, bewildered feeling.

It is not as if he is dead. It is not as if he is ill. He is only--gone. She does not understand what gone is, or why it has happened. Little as she knows of the world, she feels something is not right. It upsets Marius when she wonders, so she tries not to. She cannot help it.

"Madame?"

She looks up to see M. Courfeyrac examining her face.

She wipes her eye quickly. "It is nothing, monsieur."

M. Courfeyrac stands. "There is a fine, flowering tree in the back yard. You'll probably be able to tell me what kind. Come help me look less like a ninny next time I have to compliment it."

He holds out his arm.

Cosette hesitates, then she rises and takes it.

A door from the kitchen leads into a small back yard where a thriving magnolia stands covered in large petals, pale in the dark. They sit on the back steps looking up at it.

"Magnolia," M. Courfeyrac repeats. "No, it will not take. I'm afraid I've already forgotten."

Cosette laughs, but her laughter fades. In the quiet and without the light making her smile so no one worries, she is already close to tears.

"Madame," M. Courfeyrac says. "It's none of my business, but you seem terribly sad."

"I am a little off-color tonight, monsieur."

He is silent for some time.

"No," he says. "It isn't only tonight. Nor only this week. Only this month perhaps, but I would not swear to that."

Tears are streaming freely down her cheeks. She looks away, veiling her face with the darkness.

"It is my father, monsieur. I cannot find my father ..."

Once she begins the story, she cannot hold it back. It has almost a will of its own, something desperate and forceful Cosette had not known was in her.

She tells M. Courfeyrac everything.

\--

It is late in the evening at the Joly-Lesgles household. The Pontmercys left hours ago. Courfeyrac remains. He has not been good company tonight, not since the strange, sad story Cosette told him.

Joly and Bossuet are unbothered by his silence. For some time now they have been lying on the sofa together, and Courfeyrac is beginning to suspect they have forgotten he is here. Most of Courfeyrac's friends decided years ago he is impossible to scandalize. He finds that fact rather charming. Ignoring Joly and Bossuet, he stretches out on the other sofa.

Perhaps it is worth stepping back a little.

Some months ago, Courfeyrac got out of prison. Everyone was dead. Combeferre was not dead, but his face was so cold and lifeless Courfeyrac could not survive it.

There were no bright things after prison. Courfeyrac looked for them. He found things that dulled the dark, and even if it was not enough, it had to be enough.

Then, to his everlasting relief, he found Marius. 

Marius's bewildered grieving asked nothing of him. He made one place in the world where Courfeyrac could stop pretending he was all right.

Through February and March, Marius and Courfeyrac hardly spoke but spent hours walking through the desolate parts of the city. This was Paris as Marius knew it, the wintry fields and crumbling picturesque ruins. They sat on benches whole afternoons, saying nothing. Courfeyrac had spent years making fun of Marius's melancholy silence. Marius's melancholy silence saved his life.

As spring came on, things got better. They spent more time at the house. Courfeyrac got to know Cosette.

Cosette chatted easily in her light way, radiating kindness. She made no pretension of knowing anything and yet understood a great deal. She had discovered the best parts of Marius and grew around them like an eager vine ascending. She saw the best in everyone in a way that reminded Courfeyrac of Enjolras, but instead of Enjolras's destructive, visionary fatalism, Cosette had nothing visionary about her. She walked on the ground and smiled in the sun and loved like love was a thing the world never ran out of.

When Courfeyrac teased her, she laughed with a delight he had forgotten existed. When he spoke with her, she burst into conversation like a brook undammed. It seemed until him she had never met another person who enjoyed idle chatter as much as she did.

Something in Courfeyrac had corrupted--in war, in prison, after. He felt it in those dark early days, like grit on his soul. The company of Marius's sorrow washed it clean again. On that clean-washed ground, Cosette made flowers grow.

It has developed since then into something of a catastrophe.

Courfeyrac was not born yesterday. He is not, he flatters himself, an absolute idiot. He has been horribly, hopelessly smitten with a great many women. In his teens it happened nearly daily. It will certainly pass. He is praying it passes before he makes an utter fool of himself or either of the Pontmercys notice.

Tonight, though, he watched Cosette carry the Gillenormand household's notions of polite conversation, several-course dinners, and social convention into a house where none of those things belong. Confronted with it, she was thrown for a moment, and then she began anew, following a wiser compass, for she is above all curious and kind.

She has given Courfeyrac her father's last known address, and he is terribly excited about investigating it. Or, possibly, he is excited about riding in like Galahad and saving the lady.

He really is not an actual idiot. He knows there are problems with this.

"Jean-Francois," Musichetta calls from the kitchen. "Might you stop keeping company with people who superlatively don't need you right now and come talk to me?"

It is a fair point. He gets up.

Musichetta is leaning her elbows on the table and her chin on her hands. Her hair tonight is crimped into glossy black curls she rarely bothers with these days. She gazes at Courfeyrac with her heavy, dark brows raised in an expression that says he is not fooling anybody.

"Sit," she says. He does, and she gives him another long look. "How is Madame Pontmercy?"

His chest seizes up, but he manages to shrug lightly. "Presumably asleep. It's quite late."

"Very clever. You know I wrote a book once where I based a dashing, dangerous rake on you? He was awfully witty and he had your smile, but he played a terrible joke on a girl. Luckily she went on to marry a nice mayor and it all ended happily, but life isn't a romance. Don't be that rake, Jean-Francois."

The fact that Musichetta has figured it out does not ease Courfeyrac's mind at all. Also, with her usual tact, she has raised horrifying possibilities. He is tired and sad and thoroughly sorry about all of it, and that does not actually change anything. He folds his arms on the table and leans his head on them with a sigh.

"You told me you based a knight on me."

"I've based many knights on you. They're less pertinent to the matter at hand."

"Dare I ask what the matter at hand is?"

"My baby needs a godfather, Jean-Francois."

Courfeyrac starts. "You're asking me?"

"No. When we actually ask you we'll take you out to dinner and do the thing properly. This is a shot across the bows to tell you my baby needs a godfather who is an upstanding gentleman of good character. Don't go ruining that for me."

"Cosette is perfectly safe."

"Is that Madame Pontmercy you allude to, monsieur? Because it sounded as if you said some other name."

It is another well-deserved point, and she is being gentle about it, for her. It is nonetheless vaguely galling to be lectured on bourgeois morality by Musichetta.

"You know, some of us still remember the night Joly and Bossuet figured out you were sleeping with both of them."

"That was a good night," Joly says, coming into the kitchen. Bossuet follows. 

"Ah, our misspent youth," Bossuet agrees, and kisses Musichetta.

Joly opens a new bottle of wine and holds it up questioningly at Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac shakes his head.

Red embers glow in the fireplace, and a candle atop the cupboard burns low. Joly, having poured the wine, leans his back against the cupboard. Bossuet wraps his arms around Joly's waist. 

This warm kitchen seems to Courfeyrac a bright, fragile bubble the night could not reach. It feels like a miracle--there has been so much night. He leans his head on his folded arms again, letting the sight of the three of them seep like balm into the cracked places in his heart.

"Psst." Musichetta gestures to him with an imperious flick of her finger. "You're all the way over there, and I don't like you enough to get up."

Courfeyrac shifts his chair nearer. When he puts his head down again, her hand settles on the back of his neck, stroking gently with her thumb. He melts like a cat.

"Some of us," he says, "spent that night desperately mediating while the two of you shouted at each other from opposite sides of the Musain."

"One of you mediated," says Bossuet. "Bahorel was feeding me insults to shout."

"That explains a lot," Joly says. "I barely knew some of those words!"

Bossuet smiles at the ceiling. "Enjolras really didn't know them. Combeferre had to take him aside to explain. Oh, to have been a fly on that wall!"

"Anyway, the bad part didn't last long."

"For you, maybe," Courfeyrac grumbles. It may come out as more of a purr. "Some of us were up all night worrying."

"Again," says Bossuet, "one of you. Bahorel was fine."

"You did miss the good part of the night," Joly says thoughtfully. "That would make a difference."

Bossuet takes a long drink of Joly's wine. "What are we fighting about, anyway?"

Courfeyrac's mood sinks again, and he sits up, fixing his hair where Musichetta mussed it. "Musi wants an upstanding godfather for your baby, but for some reason she's still talking to me."

"In fairness," Bossuet says, "she's also still talking to us."

"She is," Joly agrees. "It's very decent of her."

Musichetta rises heavily, steadying herself on the table and wincing. After a moment, her face clears. She leans close and kisses Courfeyrac's cheek.

"Stay the night, Jean-Francois."

He pauses, startled. Musi's bright dark eyes smile as mischievously as they did when he was nineteen, which feels like ten thousand years ago. The sheer comforting simplicity of this proposal is so appealing it hurts.

"You mean that?"

He looks over at Joly and Bossuet, who are kissing again, pressed against the cupboard. There is a long pause while Courfeyrac waits for one of them to offer input. He should probably not stare during that pause. The cupboard is creaking. They seem to have again forgotten he is here.

"Oh!" Joly says, looking up. "No, don't ask us, she wanted the night off from us."

"Mm," Bossuet says.

Courfeyrac looks back at Musichetta, who is still grinning at him.

"Well?" she asks. "Will you brighten the evening of terribly lonely and forsaken lady?"

He kisses her hand as she smiles fondly.

"With joy, madame."

"My sweet, gallant knight."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I thought about looking into what Joly might have meant in describing Musichetta as "very literary," then I decided against that and went with what made me happiest. =)
> 
> "A more philosophical tradition" - Musichetta is probably referencing _Therese Philosophe,_ a famous pornographic novel of the 18th century. I suspect Musichetta's writing contains considerably less actual philosophy than that does.
> 
> Thank you to Akallabeth for the tip on "philosophical" as a euphemism! (Any inaccuracies in its usage are my fault.)
> 
> "Inadmissible in court" - I didn't really understand until I was researching for Lesgles's line here (that is to say, yesterday) the degree to which the Napoleonic code enforced straight-up coverture. I wish that felt less relevant to Cosette's ending in the brick.
> 
> Cosette/Having Other Friends is my OTP.
> 
> Find me on tumblr: @everyonewasabird


	4. Madmen and Magicians

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (Content note: funeral, fighting (not terribly graphic), alcoholism mention, homophobia mention, brief reference to racist and transphobic violence)

_March, 1827_

Combeferre gazed enraptured through the clearing wisps of his breath. He hardly noticed the wintry street, for his thoughts were still in the dissecting room. Under his hands had been a cadaver, but in his mind had been the marvel of the living whole in motion. Medicine was chipping like Michelangelo at the marble block of the unknown, uncovering the human form within. What better use could there be for his life than to leave in that masterpiece his own small chisel mark?

A hand took his arm out of nowhere--at least, it was out of nowhere to a man paying no attention--and a tall figure strode beside him, a familiar presence and a familiar grip.

Without looking, Combeferre began describing everything in his mind's eye. It had been the lungs he was looking at. He explained them, that wet and ballooning forest of bronchi and alveoli nestled among the blood vessels, Lavoisier's discoveries of oxygen and gaseous carbon, how oxygen mingled with the blood to aerate the slow fires of the body--there was much to tell, and far more yet to be discovered. He explained all he knew of puzzles not yet unlocked, of questions being pondered, of answers medical science teetered on the brink of finding.

He was just delving into the concordances and disagreements between Larrey and Guthrie on the treatment of sucking chest wounds when a convulsion of the hand gripping his arm alerted him Enjolras was perhaps laughing. Combeferre glanced up.

The transition from the statues of Michelangelo to Enjolras was only a mild shock. Combeferre was growing accustomed.

Enjolras was indeed laughing. His cheeks were flushed patchy red, his hair was tangled and streaked dark with sweat, and he had flung his coat and greatcoat over his shoulder like it was a summer day too warm to be borne with propriety instead of the bitter winter. He wore no cravat, and his hat was in his hand.

"Mercy!" he cried, still laughing.

"Oh, very well. How was your afternoon?"

Enjolras's grin broke the illusion of marble, for no statue had ever looked so delighted.

"An unnecessary question, I suppose," Combeferre said. _"What_ was your afternoon?"

"There is a man."

Combeferre raised his eyebrows mildly. Enjolras snorted.

"There is a man who fights very well is what I meant. Look here." He tilted his head so the fading sunlight caught a glossy purpling across his cheekbone.

"A hit," Combeferre said. "It has been some time since I managed it."

"Bahorel too."

"Did he best you?"

Enjolras raised his eyebrows.

"So who is he?"

"A terrible scapegrace, a disappointment to his parents, a hopeless libertine, and a good-for-nothing layabout--at least, when I asked him, 'who are you?' that is what he replied! Whatever else he may be, he is no conservative. He seems hardly happier with the state of politics than I! We plan to meet for drinks. I'll plumb his true principles then. You'll come?"

"If you like. What's the fellow's name?"

"Grantaire."

\--

A group.

Combeferre sensed it had long been a dream of Enjolras's. Enjolras burned with a clear fire that could illuminate anything, but when he spoke of this group, his thoughts jumbled together, inchoate and opaque. It seemed a thing lodged in him too deep to articulate. When he tried, he became almost shy.

There had been an evening back in December when he had tried again. They were walking together, wading through a trodden muck of mud and snow that choked the narrow lane and saturated Combeferre's boots and the lower third of his trousers. Enjolras talked of changing the world, and he spoke with such fire Combeferre forgot he was cold. Then Enjolras ventured into describing a meeting--an assembly--a conventicle--of men, and he grew muddled and gradually trailed off. Gently and carefully, Combeferre took up the thread. 

"The world is not changed by two men arguing with each other. We need more ideas flowing and more hands building. It will become what it becomes because of the others in it."

"Yes--" Enjolras said, and then he did not stop talking for the next five hours.

An hour or two into it, they went through a door Combeferre did not know, passed a portress, and ascended stairs to another door, which Enjolras unlocked. Combeferre found himself in a sumptuous but otherwise ordinary suite of rooms.

Enjolras collapsed into a chair in the sitting room, continuing uninterrupted as if nothing remarkable had happened. Combeferre stood some moments by the front door before removing his wet boots.

Perhaps he should have been less shocked. But getting to know Enjolras was a process of learning which lines one did not cross. There were, for instance, subjects which caused him considerable discomfort: Combeferre refused to censor his discourse on human sexuality in matters of social policy and justice, but he had learned to curtail such talk otherwise. Ditto, physical contact--Enjolras was free enough with gripping Combeferre's arm or grasping his shoulder, but if Combeferre reciprocated, he looked stricken. Worse, he tried to hide it, like the discomfort shamed him. Combeferre had adjusted his friendly gestures to maintain distance, and when they walked together he positioned his arm where Enjolras could grasp it if he chose.

Regardless, Combeferre had spent enough nights in cafes or wearing down the soles of his shoes in Enjolras's company that he had assumed Enjolras's residence was another such line. Apparently not.

Enjolras kept talking, so Combeferre got the fire started. Enjolras this engrossed might freeze to death before he noticed he was cold, and anyone who preferred not to share his fate--or, indeed, wished to prevent it--needed to look out sharply. Combeferre was also the one who ordered up supper, thereby startling Enjolras's landlady considerably. It is possible the first time Combeferre visited Enjolras's rooms was the first time anyone had.

Outside of that, Combeferre listened. Enjolras spoke of a revolution bubbling beneath the surface, of war and sacrifice, of friendship and trust, of commonality and community. Occasionally Combeferre contributed thoughts, but in truth the thing was emerging from Enjolras's head fully formed. By the end of the night, it was certain.

They would form a group.

\--

"We make too much of these liberal nobles," Enjolras murmured.

Combeferre made a noise of dissent. Peering over the heads of the crowd, he glimpsed the students of the Academy of Châlons with sad and solemn faces, bearing the coffin down the steps of the cathedral to the waiting hearse. Aristocracy and working class alike had come to pay their respects, and the density of the crowd had halted Combeferre and Enjolras well outside the church. Enjolras, an inch or two taller than Combeferre and more than that above most other people, was having less difficulty seeing.

"A reformer, yes," Enjolras went on, "and moreover, one whose death coincided with another throttling of the freedom of the press. But he propped up monarchy and befriended kings. He may fare well enough on social questions, but as to the political ones--"

"Vaccination," Combeferre said fiercely. "Do you know what it would mean to live in a world without smallpox? Once we understand the principle, other diseases currently killing millions might be rendered harmless. Our granddaughters' granddaughters' granddaughters will perhaps not watch their babes all night in terror over a rash or fever. If that world dawns, it will be partly due to his efforts promoting it."

Without turning from the solemn spectacle, Enjolras inclined his head.

"Educational reform," Combeferre went on. "Agricultural reform. Sanitary reform of hospitals when God knows we needed it. If de la Rochefoucauld-Liancourt did not fight the good fight, I don't know who ever did. I am not here to deify him, but I will honor his name."

"And stand by in case of trouble," Enjolras murmured, "as it is surely about to break out."

Combeferre looked and saw it: a hostile tension in the ranks of soldiers. He exhaled between clenched teeth. "His pupils carry him with his permission. There is no law proscribing it. They have no grounds for intervening."

"You cannot still believe that matters to the government."

"They gain a victory when we stop saying it."

Enjolras inclined his head again and surveyed the surrounding crowd. All at once he stood taller, shifting his weight with the balanced poise of a dancer or a weapon.

"There is lightning in the air," he said. "One might chart the growing rage of Paris through her funerals. Foy was well-attended but quiet. This will not be. Anger simmers beneath the surface, ever closer to boiling. How fares your dislike of violence, Combeferre?"

"A man who will not stand between peaceful pallbearers and their overreaching government can hardly claim he cares for liberty."

Enjolras's fierce smile flashed.

"The usual signals?" Combeferre asked.

"Naturally."

Enjolras dived into the crowd, all resistless conviction and merciless elbows. In seconds his fair head was some way away, bobbing and weaving towards the processing coffin. Combeferre made his slower way after, employing shoulders and apologies by turns.

He heard voices rising in anger and fear up ahead, but his view was obscured. He fought harder, upstream now, for people were fleeing. He reached the edge of the crowd in time to see the National Guard rush the unarmed students. His heart fell for an instant, as if part of him could still feel betrayed.

Then he was in it, and there was no fear or disappointment, only the fight. A guard raised his saber. Combeferre grappled him and kicked his feet, and the guard went down. Combeferre moved on to the next man, grabbing arms that held muskets, avoiding truncheons and sabers as best he could.

On the other side of the coffin, he sensed Enjolras more than he saw him: a flash of fair hair, a striking fist, a quick crouch to avoid a blow or land one. For all Combeferre's superior strength and weight, he would never have that grace.

A fist impacted Combeferre's face, the world flashed white, and he fell headlong across the mud and stones. A soldier's boot came at him. He grabbed it and yanked, and the man fell hard.

Then he was up again, wiping blood from his nose with his sleeve. There was a pale flash of an upraised hand nearby as Enjolras faultlessly ducked another blow. He must have darted nearer when Combeferre went down. Enjolras's fingers were arranged in one of the signals they had developed over the last months.

_Are you all right?_

_Fine,_ Combeferre signaled back.

They returned their attention to the fight.

The students beneath the coffin were faltering, fighting the soldiers even as they held it up. Other students and workers tried to shield them--it was not enough.

A pallbearer stumbled, and the coffin crashed to the stones. The polished wood splintered open. The body rolled into the muddy gutter. 

Shocked silence fell. Combeferre turned away in respect.

Into the silence came piercing cries and wails--the family, perhaps. Some people began to shout recriminations. Others shouted orders. Combeferre did not look at the tumult of grief or the efforts to salvage the body. There was nothing he could do but avert his eyes from travesty.

A familiar hand took his arm, and they departed together.

\--

A group.

Combeferre's friendship with Enjolras had been a kind of miracle, unique in the history of his life. He intended to appreciate it while it lasted. He did not expect it to last.

There are men who thrive in groups and men who do not. Combeferre hardly spoke except with icy brevity or at excessive length. People rarely understood him, only grudgingly tolerated him, and usually disliked him. Only one ever responded in kind. No matter how good or brave the men Enjolras gathered might be, they were unlikely to prove exceptions.

Enjolras needed the group, so Combeferre helped him build it. For himself, Combeferre needed there not to be a group.

Very well. He had been a solitary man all his life. He could become one again.

It was no great matter.

\--

Enjolras was beaming like a man in love as he dragged Combeferre from his already rushed lunch break down too many streets and into a cafe that looked like every other cafe--Combeferre was a little heartsick, and it made him melancholy.

There was a door in the back of the cafe. Enjolras held it open, and Combeferre preceded him down a dark, narrow corridor. The cafe noise had faded behind them by the time they reached the far door. Combeferre pushed it open.

It was a large, dim room of exposed laths and smoke-stained plaster. There was no one inside. Perhaps it was the hush that made Combeferre enter softly, as if stepping into a church. Enjolras remained in the doorway.

Watery light gleamed through two cloudy windows. No one would hear or see them through those. Combeferre ran his fingers across a worn and dusty table. It seemed not a lifeless thing but only sleeping, as musical instruments sleep.

Yes, he felt it--of course he did. He was no less heartsick for feeling it.

In the nearby kitchen, fire roared and plates clattered. Combeferre smelled coffee brewing and food that might just be edible. They were close to the Latin quarter, not far from the Luxembourg. There were two other doors leading from the back room, one into the kitchens, the other--

"Come see," Enjolras said, propelling Combeferre towards the other door. "After you."

Combeferre opened it and found himself atop a narrow staircase exposed to the sky but with high walls pressing close on either side. Cautiously, he descended to a short, paved path. At the end of the path he pushed open a gate into a narrow street full of market stalls and shops. Pedestrians paid him no heed. He turned as Enjolras was closing the gate, which looked as if it belonged to one of the shops beside it. It gave no hint as to what it really was.

"Good God," Combeferre said. "It's--"

"Perfect?"

"Yes."

"Here," Enjolras said, and he handed Combeferre his key to the Cafe Musain.

\--

"He's a young popinjay with a head full of women and clothes," Combeferre said. "You heard the speech he gave last month. It might have been a list of every talking point fashionable among today's republicans, without one original thought--though I grant you the delivery was spritely. I by no means say we shouldn't, I only find your enthusiasm puzzling."

Enjolras was leaning his back against one of the pillars before a law school building, smiling with downcast eyes. He appeared to be enjoying the sunshine and, possibly, some joke at Combeferre's expense.

"Am I wrong?"

When Enjolras did not answer, Combeferre sat on the steps, gazing out over the cobbled square where the popinjay was pleading with his mistress in an argument he was visibly not winning.

He was young, younger perhaps than Enjolras's twenty-one, a small man with bright eyes, a quick, mobile face, and pomaded curls beneath his shining top hat. His bottle-green coat was puffed-sleeved and narrow-waisted, tailored to within a hair's breadth of him.

"You know as well as I do the 'de' in a name means nothing," Combeferre added.

"Gestures have meaning."

"To a point."

"Well?"

"A point that falls short of anything useful."

"Useful," Enjolras repeated thoughtfully. "I refuse that framing. You are not a means to an end, and neither is he. I am building a company of generous and willing hearts, not a machine of war. I will not think of my men as defined by their utility. If I do, I am already damned."

Combeferre stared across the square. The popinjay and his mistress seemed to reach a tentative accord. She gave him back her hand and was almost looking in his direction. He was beginning to smile again. This was not what occupied Combeferre's thoughts.

"You worry about damnation."

"Morally. Not in some cosmological sense. I tend to assume the dead are dead."

"I didn't know you worried about it."

"You know what I am."

"I know you want me to say 'a machine of war.'"

"Courfeyrac!" Enjolras called suddenly, raising a hand.

"You are my friend," Combeferre said, low and quick, for the popinjay--Courfeyrac--was hurrying over. "That will always eclipse the rest, for me."

"Which was precisely my initial point." Enjolras pushed away from the pillar and descended the steps. "Do you think I did not learn it from you? Good afternoon, citizen--"

Courfeyrac flung his arms around Enjolras with a cry of enthusiasm. Enjolras went as rigid as he always did when thus accosted.

Combeferre sighed and went to join them.

"Friday," Enjolras was saying as Combeferre drew near. He had extricated himself and was staying out of reach. "Seven, at the Cafe Musain. And any men you know with similar sympathies--"

"I'll bring them," Courfeyrac said.

\--

They descended a basement stairway into a low, dark room with no windows. It felt like a cellar, though it purported to be a wine shop. It smelled of mold and water, together with an organic note hinting the seepage had some unfortunate discourse with the sewer. Combeferre saw Enjolras's eyes narrow and his nose wrinkle slightly before his face smoothed back into impassive calm.

More pressingly, the only exit was the door they had come in by. Combeferre did not like plotting sedition in places without egress.

"We can cross this off our list of Right Bank meeting venues. He chose it?"

Enjolras nodded, scanning the room.

It was quiet as wine shops went, a solitary virtue presumably explained by everything else about it. Small knots of men gathered at battered tables, talking low.

Grantaire had said he would be alone.

Combeferre had never met him, but there were few enough men alone. There was a likely-looking man of about thirty with a pointed beard, sitting with military stiffness and sipping a glass of wine, but Enjolras's eyes passed over him. There were not many others. One jovial fellow appeared to be alone until his companion stumbled back from the other side of the room, where a chamber pot sat exposed in a damp corner. Combeferre was not an overly fastidious man, but he was more fastidious than that. He glanced at Enjolras, who seemed to be pointedly refusing to notice it.

"There," Enjolras said suddenly.

Combeferre followed his gaze to a table where a man sat so still and slumped Combeferre had not registered him as a human form. There was a tension in Enjolras's face not present a moment ago.

"Let us see if we can't persuade him to patronize some other venue," Combeferre said. "Shall we?"

Enjolras's eyes remained fixed on the hunched form as he nodded.

As they approached, the man started up, blinking and swaying as he tried to clear his vision. Combeferre had been maintaining a sliver of hope he was tired rather than extremely drunk--it was not to be. His face was burnished red with alcohol, and his movements were big and slow, with sudden lurches. The fading bruise on Enjolras's cheek testified to how much grace he had lost.

A slow, sleepy smile cracked the man's wide mouth as he saw them. No one less than profoundly inebriated could have seen Enjolras's expression and kept smiling.

"Time already? I had thought to get some drinking done to quiet the nerves, but I fell asleep before I properly got started." He laughed, wild and harried. "So the bright angel of war descends into hell for a visit! And brings--a friend."

He was unhappy to see Combeferre. Perhaps he wanted Enjolras alone, or perhaps he did not like the look of Combeferre. Neither possibility was endearing.

"I hear you're a remarkable hand at singlestick," Combeferre said, taking a seat. "Enjolras says so, and he would know."

"Meaning if he had not told you, you would never have believed it. No, that is fair! Daylight. We loup-garous are only human before the sun goes down. Then it comes for us again, heaven help us."

He turned from Combeferre as he spoke to gaze at Enjolras, who sat across from him, staring at the table.

Enjolras's marble cheek had darkened with shame. "Combeferre, Grantaire," he said.

"Talk to me of revolution again." Grantaire twisted his body away from Combeferre as if trying not to see him. "You spoke so well that day I almost believed you."

"You were sober."

"Soberer. Sober-ish. Sober enough to remember how the angriest young god I ever met trounced me at my own sport then excoriated the state of the world like he could set all corruption aflame. It was the finest thing I've ever seen, probably. Do it again. Please?"

Enjolras's body snapped upright with such force his chair fell back. He stared down at Grantaire with clenched fists and clenched teeth.

"You _believed."_

"In some things." Grantaire looked up at him for a moment before bowing his head. "Maybe." He traced a puddle of liquor on the table with his finger. "I suppose I don't pass."

Enjolras folded his arms and stood in marble stillness, straight-backed and glowering. Grantaire did not look up.

Then, swiftly, Enjolras leaned down and said in Grantaire's ear, "This Friday. Seven. Musain. You know it?"

Grantaire's head lifted. He stared at Enjolras, red-eyed, almost frightened.

"Why?" he whispered.

Enjolras's lip drew back, baring his teeth. His icy face was inches from Grantaire's, and his dark blue eyes were huge and angry.

"You want to believe," he said. "So believe."

He strode away across the wine shop, ascended the steps, and was gone. 

Grantaire laid his head in his folded arms and wept. Combeferre watched him a while before rising and following Enjolras outside. 

It took some minutes to find Enjolras, for the rubbish-strewn street was dark. Combeferre eventually spotted him pacing in furious circles in a little patch of deeper shadow. He seemed to be keeping to the dark in case Grantaire emerged. Enjolras did not stop as Combeferre reached him, so Combeferre found a cleaner patch of wall and leaned against it.

Enjolras seethed as he paced, and finally spat out, "Shall you mock me now?"

"No, Enjolras."

"For--thinking well of him?"

"No."

"And still I invited him. You no doubt think me a fool."

"It was kind."

"It was _right."_ Enjolras kicked the wall then exhaled a gruff breath and settled at Combeferre's side. "And yet we both know I'll live to regret it."

"Perhaps."

"I know that means yes, Combeferre."

It did. Combeferre glanced at his wry scowl and smiled faintly.

"Perhaps."

\--

The group assembled.

Enjolras spoke only briefly. His smile was wide and shining in a way that had nothing to do with revolution. War did not make Enjolras smile like that. When he finished talking, he unrolled a fine old rag paper map of France under the Republic and began tacking it to the wall.

They watched without speaking. When he stepped back at last, the map seemed an eerie, breathless thing, illuminating as a window and dangerous as a flag.

Enjolras resumed his chair in the corner. The talk he had interrupted bubbled forth again.

Combeferre watched the proceedings from a seat by the far wall.

Grantaire was holding court nearby. Bottles cluttered his table, and he had kicked up his feet on a chair. He rambled at length, largely to himself. Combeferre heard bitterness, classical allusions, and veiled, half-mocking praise of Enjolras. Enjolras turned red and ignored it.

If Grantaire truly gave offense, Enjolras would not hesitate to throw him out. Combeferre was moderately surprised it had not happened yet, but perhaps nothing could dampen Enjolras's good mood tonight.

On Combeferre's other side, Courfeyrac had just introduced to one another the two men he had invited, and he became rapidly superfluous as they fell to talking. It seemed one of them had been evicted from his rooms that morning.

"Well," the man clarified, "not so much evicted as ... a tree fell. Last night."

"A tree!" cried the other.

"Through the roof, directly onto my bed."

"No!"

"I wasn't in it at the time."

"Thank God for that! Has your landlord another room to put you in?"

"He has--"

"But?"

"There was a reason I was not in my bed."

"Oh no."

"This landlord--he has a daughter."

"Oh dear."

"In investigating the tree, he happened upon me and the daughter."

"And so--"

"I am not to be welcomed into another room. I am cast out."

"You are quite homeless, then!"

"I am quite homeless."

"That will not do!"

"It won't, but what am I to do about it?"

The other pounded his cane once upon the floor, decisively. "Live with me!"

"You mean that?"

"Of course I mean it!"

And they shook each other warmly by the hand.

Combeferre had not managed to bring anyone. Enjolras had brought a quiet young working man--a fan painter, Combeferre had gathered. This young man had retreated to a far corner, nervous and shy and not looking at anyone. It was probably incumbent on Combeferre to go and speak with him. He was still persuading himself to do this when the door slammed open.

A huge man strode in, trim of beard and wild of hair. His waistcoat was a brilliant scarlet, embroidered with gold, and his coat was a dark, gleaming blue. Combeferre had met Bahorel before, at other revolutionary groups and whenever Enjolras wanted practice fighting multiple assailants at once.

"Other meeting went long, sorry," Bahorel said. His booming voice was enormous. "Hope I'm not--" He stopped short, then pointed at Courfeyrac and burst out laughing. "You!"

"The prior engagement!" Courfeyrac cried, leaping up.

"The dapper fellow who questioned my revolutionary spirit!" 

Combeferre became newly glad of their distance from the cafe.

Courfeyrac ran over and pumped Bahorel's hand. The top of his head barely reached Bahorel's shoulder. "You wouldn't be recruited! I thought you were trying to put me off!" 

"I know! I felt terrible!"

"Secret meeting!"

"The same secret meeting!"

In the flurry of shouts and handshakes, it took Combeferre some time to notice the thin young man behind Bahorel. Unlike Courfeyrac and Bahorel, who were dressed at the height of fashion--that is, their clothes were new, well-tailored, and expensive-looking, so Combeferre assumed they were fashionable--this other man had very long red hair, ill-fitting trousers, and what might have been a medieval doublet beneath his too-large frock coat.

Courfeyrac spotted him and wrung his hand too. The young man said his name too low for Combeferre to catch.

Bahorel and his companion went to greet Enjolras, who had risen at his table, smiling. The young man introduced himself again, still in a whisper. Combeferre could easily have joined them but did not.

Courfeyrac meandered through the room, pausing to chat with or tease everyone he passed. His entire demeanor threatened imminent conversation. Combeferre avoided his eye.

No, perhaps Combeferre was not making the proper effort.

His spirits were depressed and his heart troubled. He did not like rooms of strangers. He was not made for noise and tumult. He was not made for war, and in the end, war was what they were planning.

Enjolras listened to the chaos with downcast eyes and a soft smile, more gentled than Combeferre had ever seen him. It was clear on his face he adored them all already. He bore even Grantaire's facetious obsequiousness with patience, like one who trusts in the salubrious properties of a bitter medicine.

He would thrive among these men. 

Combeferre had only to slip away quietly, without making a fuss. He had been ascertaining whether things had come to that. He supposed they had.

It was Feuilly--the fan painter--whom Courfeyrac fell upon, and Combeferre was hardly the less dismayed. Courfeyrac had the manners of one born to status; Feuilly's name evoked his profession because he had no legal name, as happened sometimes with orphans. Courfeyrac could chat for hours; Feuilly was serious and quiet. Any one of Courfeyrac's garments cost more than Feuilly's entire wardrobe. Combeferre could hardly imagine two men with less in common.

He tried not to listen to Courfeyrac's bright, faltering efforts at conversation.

"Of Meaux!" cried a startled voice on Combeferre's other side. It was one of Courfeyrac's two recruits: Joly, Combeferre had gathered, a young medical student.

"... Yes?" said the other.

"Your name is Lesgles," Joly said. His eyes were wide with wonder and import. "Of Meaux. Do you hear it? Lesgles ... _of Meaux."_

His companion gasped. "You mean--"

 _"Bossuet!"_ Bahorel roared from three tables over.

A hush fell. The rude christening had a certain solemnity.

"Every modern abuse of a people by a foreign power is a mere journeyman's copy of the crime of 1772!" someone cried, striking a table.

It was Feuilly, arguing with Courfeyrac.

The solemn moment broken, the tumult resumed.

"Poland!" Courfeyrac said. "Really? Poland?"

"The current plight of the Polish people strikes at the very heart of the matter!"

"I can't see how!"

Amid the noise, Combeferre heard Feuilly launch into an impassioned analysis of the partition of Poland.

Bahorel broke off arguing with Grantaire and turned to listen. Enjolras came around the other side of his table to hear Feuilly better. Courfeyrac was manifestly losing the argument, but he wore an air of satisfaction regardless.

As he should. He had gone straight to the man most out of place and drawn him into the group.

"What have you learned?" a soft voice asked.

Combeferre nearly upended his chair turning. The red-haired man sat close beside him--startlingly close. Combeferre steadied his hands on the table, trying to calm his breathing.

"What have I--?"

"You are concentrating very hard on us. I wondered if you had learned anything."

Combeferre could not tell whether he was being teased. The young man's pale eyes seemed to gaze both into him and through him, and he wore a faint, secret smile. For all that he had started the conversation, he appeared timid, rocking as he sat and winding his nervy, restless hands around each other.

"Combeferre," Combeferre said. "I did not catch your name."

"Names--" The young man wrung his hands faster.

"The question is complicated?"

"No--my name is Jean Prouvaire."

He was not looking at Combeferre anymore.

"But--?" Combeferre prompted.

"I decided some time ago I preferred Jehan."

"The medieval form of Jean?" Combeferre said. "You are a medievalist, then."

"Among many things. Yes. The medievals had much to teach us. We are wrong to draw a straight line from the classical era to the present, as if no one in the interim said or did anything worth remembering!"

The red in his cheek seemed no longer embarrassment but fervor. Combeferre found himself unexpectedly charmed.

"Tell me something worth remembering--if you would."

Prouvaire gazed down for some time, then he looked up with a crooked smile and eyes bright with mischief. He leaned close and lowered his voice.

"Since that welcome silence fell in 1791," he said, "we the enlightened citizens of France have considered ourselves broad-minded. We no longer define it legally, we execute nobody for it, and if we are hateful and cruel--well! Such is tolerance. People flock here for the privilege of being tolerated, and alas, they have reason to. But we must never forget what thin gruel we are grateful for."

Combeferre kept his face perfectly still.

Many laws changed with the Penal Code of 1791. He had no grounds for thinking the subject on his mind was the one on Prouvaire's. He reiterated this point to himself fiercely as the blood rose in his cheeks.

"Did you know two men could marry in medieval France?" Prouvaire asked, in a soft voice that struck Combeferre's equivocations like a cannonball. "Or very nearly."

He did not wait for a reply, which was lucky, as Combeferre could not speak.

"Via affrèrement, two men could declare themselves brothers, conjoin their households and possessions, and make one another their heirs. There were many reasons to do so, of course--I do not mean to say it usually involved the reasons people marry. But never doubt it was used for that as well. Even as we envision tomorrow, we must not assume our forebears all benighted fools nor expect the path we climb to be an unbroken ascent."

How had Combeferre ever thought him timid? He stared into Prouvaire's fierce smile and shining eyes and knew himself to be the coward.

"Your turn," Prouvaire said with a softer smile. "What is something you think about?"

Combeferre could demur. He could mention some subject upon which he had no overheated convictions, thereby saving Prouvaire from protracted boredom and himself from heartache.

He was not going to. He felt his too-fervid opinions slipping their leashes and coming unmuzzled. He was filled with preemptive regret.

"Moths," he said.

"Moths!"

Combeferre's hands were damp and unsteady as he rubbed his face. It was absurd. He had been in a fight against soldiers the other day, armed only with his fists. This was worse.

"I happened by the National Museum of Natural History last week. There was an exhibition of _Bombyx mori_ \--that is, the domesticated silkworm moth--alongside some wild moth species. It has been occupying my mind. That is, it is not the sole thing occupying my mind. It is one of the things."

He broke off, hoping to make an early end of it.

"Well?" Prouvaire demanded, half laughing. "You are not going to leave it there!"

Combeferre took a deep breath.

"It struck me what pallid, sorry things we made of silkmoths for the sake of silk. Compared to their wild cousins, their pigment has gone, the males cannot fly, they cannot breed without human intervention--I am failing to capture the vastness of difference! Here."

He rummaged in his bag for ink and a quill. Failing to find a fresh sheet of paper, he ripped out a page of class notes which he flipped to the blank side. On the blotted surface he sketched both moths as he had seen them pinned to their cards.

"You see? It could not be more stark!"

Prouvaire leaned close and made a pleased sound. "Like a wolf beside a pug."

"Worse! Some independent life remains to the pug--it can run about, if not quite as wolves do. The reason for the altered morphology is certainly the same. Men have bred these moths for centuries. This feebleness is the result of our selecting for silk production, and I do not doubt the silk is better for it. This creature exists to suit our purposes, not its own. Its very life is not its own."

Combeferre gazed down at the pale, flightless wings and the patterned strong ones, the work of man and the work of God. He touched the lines of the diminished moth.

More quietly, he said, "The nature of human labor is changing. England is far ahead, and France must catch up. We will build grand things, and I believe in those things with all my heart. France must embrace the railroad, the balloon, factory work, she must embrace it all. And yet--I look at this moth and am afraid."

"For those who will perform the labor," Prouvaire said quietly.

"We cannot place profit or progress above human life."

"It is true, and yet I value progress."

"Progress will out," Combeferre said. "For the wild moth changed too--is changing--will always be changing. I have been reading Lamarck. He theorizes that animals adapt to suit their environments while increasing in complexity over the generations. After eons of imperceptible shifts towards different strategies for survival, groups within a species diverge from each other. In time, one species becomes two, two become many--but I am surely boring you."

Prouvaire gave him a bemused and wonderstruck smile. "You are overthrowing God and exalting the future in His place. Pray continue."

Combeferre gazed at him a startled moment before remembering himself.

"The mechanism Lamarck proposes is the heritability of the individual's use and disuse of its organs. Each generation of giraffes--"

Here, Combeferre noticed the searchlight gaze of Enjolras fixed upon him.

"Different Lamarque," he said mildly.

Enjolras nodded and went back to his discussion with Feuilly.

"But regardless," Combeferre went on, "if species have been diverging since the beginning, how many were there to start with? A few, or only one? Whence did the vital property arise? Is there a God who bestowed that spark? Is any other explanation possible?"

"Thus is God a glorified dog-breeder," Grantaire called from his table. "And all that looked pristine under the morning dew is but millennia of Him picking favorites among amorous squabbling mutts!"

"... I suppose that is another way of putting it."

To Combeferre's regret, Grantaire rose and stumbled over. He stood over the table, swaying a little and gazing down at the moths with wet eyes and puckered eyelids. His expression might have been profound sorrow but was more likely drunkenness.

Grantaire picked up the page, half crumpling it. He perused the drawings in the flickering light of the candle on the table.

"I do still need the notes on the other side," Combeferre said, "so if you could refrain--"

"Man's moth is ugly enough!" Grantaire said. "But what of God's? Little animals designed to throw themselves at what kills them! What a sophisticated sense of humor God has." He took a long drink from the bottle in his hand, still staring at the moths.

Combeferre glanced at Prouvaire. Far from looking annoyed, Prouvaire was gazing up at Grantaire with startled sympathy.

"I drink deep to the moth!" Grantaire said, brandishing the page. Suddenly intuiting how this was bound to end, Combeferre made a grab for it. Grantaire evaded him.

"--And I grant him his consummation!"

He thrust the page into the candle flame. Combeferre lunged again, but Grantaire held the paper away from him, watching it blacken and burn.

"Man made of bombyx a mockery," Combeferre grumbled. "You made it a punchline!"

Prouvaire, nearer, snatched the page at last and patted out the flames. Grantaire meandered off to bother someone else while Prouvaire and Combeferre assessed the damage.

"Alas! I have salvaged for you the halves of two moths, a selection of sentence fragments, and--is that half a spleen?"

"Kidney. I appreciate your efforts on its behalf."

Prouvaire smiled, leaning his cheek on his hand as he flipped the page back to the moths. He traced his finger over the blackened edge of the wild moth.

"I cannot deny it is poetic of them."

"They mean nothing by it," Combeferre said, sitting beside him again. "They fix the angle of the moon and stars to chart a straight course, the same way a seafarer does. It is perfectly rational. It is only that if one mistakes a candle for some more distant body, one spirals quickly to one's death."

"Is that so?" Prouvaire raised his eyes to Combeferre's face with a curious smile. Perhaps it was the proximity that made it dizzying.

"Don't act superior to the little beasts!" Grantaire called from the next table, where Joly and Bossuet had pulled him down and were keeping him between them. "Don't tell me no fatuous _ignis fatuus_ ever seduced _your_ eye down from the heavens!"

Combeferre eased away from Prouvaire, hoping the dimness hid the creeping blush. 

Prouvaire, untroubled, tapped the moths thoughtfully. "I would not wish to part you from your notes--"

"I think their utility as notes is well behind them."

"Then--might I keep the moths?"

"I would be very glad if you did."

It was an effort to pull his gaze from Prouvaire's smile. Combeferre made himself do so and looked around, belatedly remembering there were other people present.

Across the room, Enjolras was watching him.

There was tension in Enjolras's jaw and in his gaze. For an instant, Combeferre had a hideous fear the look was about Prouvaire. Then he saw Enjolras's hand lying with feigned casualness on the table beside him, arranged in a signal only Combeferre knew:

_Do you wish me to intervene?_

Their hand signals had proved useful many times in the last months. The two of them found themselves often in protests and riots, and moreover they both had faces that occasionally inspired men to unpredictable violence. They signaled to each other when intervention was necessary. The limits of the medium meant it could require some interpretation, however.

What Enjolras meant now was, _If you ask me to throw Grantaire out, I will._

It sounded like a perfect outcome to Combeferre. His feelings about the group had warmed under Prouvaire's influence, with that one exception. He thought how pleasant it would be to get to know these men without the intrusion of Grantaire's bitter rambling and poorly curbed impulses. It was wiser anyway--revolution was not a game, and their secret society was dangerous enough without admitting a loose-tongued drunk who thought them all ridiculous. Whatever Enjolras's coming dawn looked like, it was hard to picture Grantaire in it.

Combeferre let himself consider all this, and then he looked at the tension in Enjolras's face again. Whatever this group meant to Enjolras--his blinding hope for the future, perhaps--Grantaire was part of it. They were all already part of it. Combeferre suspected, though he would never say it aloud, that Enjolras was more than half in love with all of them. Grantaire no more than the others, but no less, either.

Grantaire was irritating, but he was no worse than that. He would not be that much hardship.

Combeferre met Enjolras's eyes, smiled gently, and shook his head. 

Enjolras's marble posture collapsed a little. For some moments, he sat with his eyes shut and his head bowed, unguarded amid this rowdy company in a way Combeferre had never seen before. Finally, he looked up and held Combeferre's gaze with a soft and brilliant smile.

Then Enjolras returned to his conversation with Bahorel and Feuilly. Combeferre turned back to Prouvaire--and Courfeyrac, who was just joining them.

"Listen," Courfeyrac said, seating himself with a serious expression. "You're a poet, right? And you--" He waved vaguely at Combeferre. "--Are a lot of things. The thing is, this group is in desperate need of a name. I think it may be up to us. Citizens, have you thoughts?"

When Combeferre had believed he was leaving, the question had not much mattered. But now--he pushed back his sleeves and leaned forward across the table towards Courfeyrac.

"I did have a few..."

\--

The long night had drawn to a close. All the new men had departed, save Grantaire, who was meandering towards the back door while Enjolras held it open implacably. Grantaire still rambled in his disjointed fashion, but Joly and Bossuet seemed to have softened the bitterest edges of it. The adjoining kitchen was silent and dark.

Grantaire exited at last. Combeferre laid his head on his folded arms on the table and shut his eyes, exhausted in muscles no medical textbook could name. It had been a good night. It had been a remarkable night. The men were extraordinary. They were everything Enjolras had said they must be. It was also intrinsic to Combeferre's nature that interacting with seven strangers for seven hours sapped every resource he had.

He heard the back door shut softly and footsteps approach. They were familiar footsteps, and he did not stir. Enjolras came around the table to the chair Prouvaire had vacated. Combeferre heard him sit and felt the weight of a hand rest on his shoulder.

It helped, and he did not bother hiding it. He exhaled a long sigh without otherwise moving. They stayed thus for some minutes.

"You were morose," Enjolras said. "More than morose. You seemed like a man contemplating some desperate measure. I thought I should have to pick a fight tonight to make you speak of it."

It gave Combeferre a strange, unsteady feeling, like relief.

"You would have fought with me?"

"I'd have endeavored to make you discuss it, which I suspect would have provoked such an argument as we have rarely had." Enjolras sounded faintly wistful. "It seems I shall not need to."

"Jehan Prouvaire is a madman and a magician."

"Of course he is. They all are."

Combeferre turned his head without raising it and opened his eyes. The room was all dark grays and darker grays, for the only candle still lit was on a distant table. The illumination through the dirty windows might have come through the depths of the sea. Still, there was a little brilliance in Enjolras's eye and just enough radiance across his pale cheek to show a smile.

"My God, Enjolras," Combeferre said. "What happened here tonight?"

The light in Enjolras's eye brightened and softened.

"The group," he said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Jehan's discussion of affrèrement is borrowing heavily from @sinceremercy's post on the subject:  
> https://sinceremercy.tumblr.com/post/188352429656/affr%C3%A8rement-same-sex-households-in-medieval
> 
> I illustrated the first scene of this chapter, and you can see it here:  
> https://everyonewasabird.tumblr.com/post/190520034904/future-scene-from-my-wip-500-words-march
> 
> And this one is a brick illustration, but it does happen to involve Enjolras glaring at Grantaire in a wine shop:  
> https://everyonewasabird.tumblr.com/post/190881714049/dominoes
> 
> tumblr: @everyonewasabird


	5. The Darkest Season

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: dealing with past trauma, description of (mild) triggering, description of cholera pandemic and hospitals (past), gender dysphoria mention, misgendering, racism, guns, alcohol use.

_June, 1833_

Combeferre does not understand what June will mean until it is upon him.

He lies awake all night on the first, paralyzed with memory, knowing worse is to come. There are less than two hours of full darkness in Paris this time of year. He watches the long, eerie twilight through his window and remembers sitting atop the barricade that night, rifle in hand and two pistols in his waistband, gazing down the deserted Rue de la Chanvrerie.

He rises with the dawn, unrefreshed, and tries to work. He cannot concentrate.

His desk is piled so high with newspapers he feels walled in. There is a year's worth of Parisian obituaries there, together with the obituary pages from last summer for a host of southern towns. There is a tall stack of scrapbooks pasted with every article he could find mentioning anyone connected with the rebellion. Some days it feels useful, and other days he thinks he has invited a company of ghosts to haunt him.

It is the latter kind of day. He gets up and paces.

His desk and his bed are close beside each other, for he has only the one room. The plaster is crumbling and stained, and he had to take his small surviving collection of books from the bookshelf and pile them under his desk, for the ceiling over the bookshelf leaks. The wind is wrong today, so his room stinks of the factories, which at least blots out the smell from the Villejuif slaughterhouse across the street.

This is not the worst boarding house in Paris. He has a window. The ceiling is high enough for even a tall man to stand, and he has looked deep enough into dire social questions to know this is not always the case. He is certain someone somewhere lives in a worse building. He has a great deal of pity for them.

He has the building to himself aside from Madame Burgon, so at least it is quiet. He has never pinned down whether he should have his letters addressed to number 50 or number 52, so he has people write both just to be safe. It is not much hardship, and the postman seems to know.

He is tired, but trying to sleep will not avail him. He has no head for foreign languages right now and still less for research. Eventually he settles into smoothing the infelicitous sentences from the stack of translations he has drafted. It is absorbing enough and necessary enough, even if as a day's work it leaves something to be desired. By the end of the day, he has some articles finished and ready to send off, which means he will get paid.

He lies down that night and cannot sleep. He remembers his last murmured conversation with Prouvaire; Bahorel's final belligerent grin; Feuilly carving words into the plaster wall with an unreadable frown. He remembers the child Gavroche amid the smoke and bodies, rising up to sing. He gives up lying down and paces instead.

The following day and night are no better.

He begins to wonder how he will ever sleep again. Laudanum would do it, but that is a dark carriage drawn by unruly horses. He disembarked it last autumn only with difficulty and under his mother's jaundiced eye. He fears he would not manage it again. He tells himself this sleeplessness cannot last. His body cannot stay awake forever.

This is more or less a lie. 

Last March, April, and May were a sleepless nightmare of days and nights walking overfilled hospital wards, watching men, women, and children die by the hour. Like something from some bizarre tale of horror, all their faces were the same face, sunken, withered, and blue with cholera.

He remembers the ominous, fishy odor of cholera. He remembers spooning opium into mouth after mouth, handing out chamomile tea and lemonade to the desperately thirsty, rubbing warming liniments into icy, cramped legs until his shirt was soaked with the effort. They died no matter what he did. He would come home after midnight and sit awake because he could not bear his dreams. He would return to work a few hours later.

It might have ended even worse than it did, but Enjolras rose like an apparition in the dead of night with a terrifying expression and forced Combeferre to sleep. Thereafter, Enjolras stationed himself between Combeferre and the cliff's edge.

It is the night of the fourth of June, and there is no Enjolras now. Combeferre lies staring at the gray of his ceiling thinking there is nothing left they have not destroyed.

Someone knocks. There is no mystery as to who, for Courfeyrac is already talking.

"I'm not waking you up, am I? There's no way I'm waking you up. I'm terribly sorry if I'm waking you up, I woke Ma'am Bougon up, but I can't help thinking you probably aren't sleeping any better than--"

Combeferre flings open the door and embraces him so precipitously they nearly overbalance into the hallway. The rest of Courfeyrac's speech is muffled in Combeferre's nightshirt.

"Not you either?" Courfeyrac asks when he is released.

"No," Combeferre says.

They settle in Combeferre's narrow bed, back to back with the simplicity of exhausted children. Combeferre barely registers the soft regularity of Courfeyrac's breathing before the tide of sleep pulls him under.

He wakes with afternoon light reflecting off the neighboring building through his small window and onto his face. Courfeyrac is sitting on the edge of the bed, lacing his boots. He sees Combeferre awake and smiles--blurrily, as Combeferre is not wearing his glasses.

"Better?"

"Good God." Combeferre rolls onto his face on the pillow, but he also gropes for Courfeyrac's hand and squeezes it when he finds it. "Thought I'd go mad."

"Listen, I have to get going. Would it be unforgivably selfish of me to propose my rooms going forward? I have no idea what your neighborhood smells like, but--"

"Dye mordants from the textile factories when it doesn't smell like the abattoir. I'll be at your door this evening."

"Promise?"

Combeferre gropes for his glasses and puts them on. Courfeyrac looks scared, like he is staring down all the sleepless nights Combeferre has also been imagining.

"Yes," Combeferre says. "Are you all right?"

"Getting some sleep this month seems like a start, doesn't it?"

"I'll be there," Combeferre says.

\--

There had been a safe house.

Left to himself, Enjolras would not have had one. Combeferre insisted: some of them might live, and if Louis-Philippe's government did not fall, they would be in danger.

Enjolras did not look up from his writing. "If you object to danger, Combeferre, we have some pressing matters to discuss."

"I don't mind falling in battle," Combeferre said. "It is giving ourselves to the police I object to. That's not martyrdom, it is only more power in the hands of the police."

Enjolras conceded and rented a garret room in a safe house.

Combeferre stands before it now.

The house is a sprawling, ramshackle thing, out at the edge of Paris where the buildings dwindle and are interspersed with fields. He cares nothing for the rotting porch or the rooms on the ground and first stories. He fixes his eyes on the garret, as if there is some possibility.

There is not. It has been a year. This place was a temporary refuge, rented only through June and July.

Combeferre has no reason to think anyone ever used it. He and Pontmercy did not awaken until months later. Courfeyrac was taken to prison wounded and only released in November. Joly and Bossuet did not go to the safe house, they went home to Musichetta, where Bossuet raved with fever for weeks and Joly stayed in the bath.

And still, Combeferre looks at the garret and imagines it full of ghosts.

\--

He knocks on the side door, the one they were asked to use. The man inside refuses to open. Combeferre gives him the password, and still he will not. They argue through the door. The man says he need not open up, since their rent expired, if indeed they ever rented the place, which he can neither confirm nor deny.

There appears to be a great deal he will neither confirm nor deny. He was supposed to be an acquaintance of Bahorel's, but the problem with knowing as many people as Bahorel did is not all of them turn out to be heroes.

"Talk to me through the door, then," Combeferre says. "Did anyone come that night?"

"I saw nobody."

Combeferre, not unacquainted with both wordplay and dithering, narrows his eyes.

"Behind that door as you are, you could likewise say you did not see me."

There is a pregnant silence. He takes it as confirmation.

"Did anyone come here using this password?"

The silence continues.

"How many people?"

"Didn't see anybody."

"I gathered as much. How many?"

"I run a discreet establishment."

"How many?"

Silence.

"You will not win this," Combeferre says. "I will stand here knocking until I have an answer. The occasional renters of the garret are not the only people who come to your door. I hazard the others are not more sanguine about being seen than we were. If I am standing here, they will not come. I have no wish to know your business, but as long as I stand here, you will lose that business."

"I'll summon the police."

"Will you? It is true I am not fond of the police. I think you are much less so."

Further silence ensues.

"Come now," Combeferre says. "This is easy. You will furnish me with information on anyone who visited the garret while my friends and I rented it. Description of voices, number of people, duration of stay, and any other observations you may have. In return, I will leave you in peace to welcome whatever traffic this door receives that you find so much more congenial than mine."

He waits through the silence that follows.

"Two men," the voice says.

Combeferre's pulse beats suddenly hard against the stricture of his collar. The humid heat is stifling. These are two survivors he does not know about. Who were they? If one was Enjolras, who could the other possibly have been?

"Very good," he says. "Describe their voices for me."

"They whispered."

"What else?"

"Nothing else."

"Was either injured?"

"I don't know."

"How long did they stay?"

The man goes quiet again.

"You are doing very well," Combeferre says. "You have almost got rid of me. You need only say a little more."

"One stayed a few days. I don't know. The other longer."

"How long?"

"Month or so."

"Anything else?"

The man is silent until he realizes Combeferre will not leave until he answers.

"No."

"I have a five franc piece in my hand," Combeferre says. "I will leave it on the step if you can add anything."

A quiet moment passes.

"Slow on the stairs," the voice says at last. "Might've been injured. Don't know."

Combeferre's heart beats harder.

It might be meaningless, and it might be a window into horrors. The glimmers Combeferre catches of that night make him restless and afraid, and he wants more of them.

"Very good. Anything else?"

There is a pause.

"No."

"Thank you for your time," Combeferre says. He leaves the coin and goes.

\--

Combeferre's brain is fire as he walks. He has loosened his cravat and carries his hat and coat. Passersby see his disheveled aspect and his eyes full of visions and veer away. Those who do not, he veers away from himself, for he has walked Paris too long not to be wary of cutthroats and thieves even when he is hardly looking. 

Who were the men? Enjolras, his heart prompts him, one must have been Enjolras--he fights that certainty. He cannot be sure. And still his heart insists on it.

And the other? He prefers the idea of Enjolras escaping with someone to Enjolras alone, but who could it have been? He has verified the deaths of his friends in every way he can: letters to families, the obituaries in their hometown newspapers, visits to graves, and the input of everyone he can convince to discuss the matter. He has discovered no ambiguities other than Enjolras.

He put extra care into confirming Grantaire simply because he could not see why Grantaire was dead. Grantaire had slept through it all, he did not agree with the cause, and while he frequently offended people, he never warranted that.

But it would not have taken much. From all Combeferre has read, the National Guard had a field day after the rebellion was crushed, bayoneting on sight any insurgent they found alive. They were cruel and brutal, and no one reigned them in. If someone heard Grantaire snore--of course they would have done it.

At any rate, Combeferre has a letter of confirmation from Grantaire's father, who was so unpleasant a correspondent it almost explained Grantaire. The sentence asserting Grantaire's death contained the phrase "useless reprobate." Combeferre has the obituary from Grantaire's hometown newspaper as well, a sadly glowing description of a cheeky art student who hardly resembled the man Combeferre knew.

No, the second man was not Grantaire.

Combeferre leaves the fields and enters the tangled streets, squeezing past pedestrians and carriages. He is deafened by the talk in the markets and the hoofbeats and wheels on stone. The air is close and humid almost past breathability, thick with pending rain and the smells of refuse, horses, humanity, the summer flowers, fresh baked bread, the open sewer, and the muddy river. The shouts of sellers and drivers are piercing in these boxed-in streets. He never used to be a nervous man.

He reaches the more open corner of a boulevard and leans against a wall to catch his breath, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. He is warm--but it is a hot day. He is overwhelmed by the crowd--but in this place and hour the crowds are overwhelming, and he never liked crowds much. There is some morbid oppression of the senses, perhaps.

He shuts his eyes and waits for it to pass. It does in a few minutes. Such reactions are not unfamiliar, but they grow milder and less frequent as his health improves. He was a doctor long enough to know not all are so lucky.

Having recovered himself, he resumes his journey and train of thought.

Among the twenty-six men who went into the final fight, there were a few names he did not know at the time. The lists of dead have been helpful. He has verified the nineteen deaths--that is to say, everyone save himself, Joly, Lesgles, Courfeyrac, Pontmercy, the white-haired man, and Enjolras.

He tries not to think too hard about those numbers, the seven survivors--or twelve if one includes the men who left in borrowed uniforms--out of what had begun as fifty. The death toll everywhere was hideous, but their little barricade in the Rue de la Chanvrerie feels accursed.

With whom did Enjolras escape?

If Enjolras did escape.

Combeferre wants it to have been the white-haired man. He wants the story of Enjolras's survival to have been infused with the old man's radiant peace. But the old man would have mentioned it.

In the old man's absence, Combeferre imagines Enjolras surviving alone. He imagines him believing them all dead, believing himself responsible. He imagines what Enjolras would have done, believing that.

It terrifies him.

\--

Rain pelts the panes on Courfeyrac's tall windows. The storm broke as Combeferre was arriving. Last year the fifth began with rain. This year, it ends with it.

The blue dusk between the curtains reminds Combeferre of that morning last year. Dawn glimmered through the raindrops that beaded the floor-length windows of the dining room, gleaming on the guns he and Enjolras were laying on the table--

Combeferre gets up and closes the drapes.

Courfeyrac looks up. "Oh?"

"Rain," Combeferre says, returning to his seat.

"Ah."

In the warm softness of the candlelight, with a book in his lap and Courfeyrac on the other side of the fire, last June recedes. The furnishings of Courfeyrac's sitting room gleam bright and daringly striped in the candlelight.

Courfeyrac looks healthy again, with flesh on his bones and color in his cheeks. He is dressed more brilliantly than ever, for his father has been floating questions of matrimony. Unlike so many of the Friends living or dead, Courfeyrac is affectionate and easy with his family and sometimes even listens to them. He has been plunging into society of late, taking up his time with balls and dinner parties. The fresh gleam of his clothes and rooms bespeaks a good-faith effort.

Combeferre takes a deep breath.

"I went to the safe-house today."

Courfeyrac is suddenly far paler. "... And?" he asks, half-unwillingly. Combeferre has noticed before that he hates the subject.

Combeferre could elaborate. His head is full with turning over what he has learned. Perhaps he is a coward not to say it.

"Nothing definitive."

"If you really found something, you don't have to hide it."

Courfeyrac is tensed and nervous, not quite looking at him. If these questions of Enjolras's fate make him uncomfortable, that is surely his prerogative.

"I'll tell you when I discover something truly important. How's that?"

"Thank you."

"Tell me about these parties." Combeferre gestures towards a formal suit still hanging on the back of a door. "How is high society?"

"Every bit as absurd as you think. You'd be glaring at everybody in intimidating silence all night long."

"Very likely. How is it for you?"

"Oh, I spend a lot of time wishing you were there to glare at everybody in intimidating silence. Not that I want to inflict it on you--it's just funnier. But I've survived, mostly. I've met just about every eligible girl in Paris."

"To no avail?"

Courfeyrac shrugs, looking tired. "Sometimes I think our grandparents' generation had the right of it. Secure a sensible match, then spend your life making love to everybody but your spouse."

"I can't say I'd choose otherwise in your place, but you know that's different."

"I'm glad nobody's making you do it."

"I'm sorry they're making you."

"They're not, not really." He waves vaguely. "Family name, family responsibilities. You know."

"I'm still sorry."

Courfeyrac rises restlessly and pokes at the fire, which exists more for cheeriness than temperature. A few sparks rise and a log collapses. He sighs, lays down the poker, and sits on the sofa beside Combeferre, slouching down to lean against Combeferre's shoulder.

"Damn this day."

"I know," Combeferre says.

\--

They settle into a June routine. Whatever each does during the day, in the evenings Combeferre goes to Courfeyrac's rooms. He has a key for nights when Courfeyrac is out late, and he lets himself in. He sleeps mainly on a spare mattress Courfeyrac laid on his floor. Listening to Courfeyrac breathe, he can sleep.

The arrangement scares him at first. He sees the same fear in Courfeyrac. The days when they fought like wildcats in these rooms were not that long ago.

But their evenings are easy now. What disagreements they have are gentle and soon mended. Whatever volatile chemical reaction they produced between them before, it has gone.

It is a tremendous relief.

\--

The buildings in Combeferre's mother's neighborhood still bear the pocks and cracks from last year's gunfire. The Rue de la Chanvrerie is only two blocks away. As always, Combeferre tries not to look.

His mother seems well, and he is glad. She appears to be drawing the same conclusions about him: he sees her satisfied nod. That is most of the purpose of these visits, for talking has never gone well for the two of them. Of all the people who do not understand the precise, abstruse way Combeferre speaks, she has always troubled him most. His erudition confuses her, his implacable calm confuses her, and the quiet rage beneath his calm confuses her most of all.

She grew up in a family of some status; unlike Combeferre's father, she is French-born and white. She lives on what little money remains, sewing when the arthritis in her hands allows. Combeferre sends her what he can.

They sit down to tea. She updates him on her friends' ailments, folding in unsubtle hints about how Parisian doctors are never out of work. She speaks of various friends' unmarried daughters, and Combeferre declines to make the acquaintance of each in turn. They have been having this conversation long enough that her disappointment is at least unsurprised.

He sips his tea and thinks how the noise of the fighting must have filled this room. His mother did not yet know he was there, but she may have deduced enough about his politics to wonder. If she spotted Enjolras passing in the street below, she would have known for certain. 

Combeferre hopes she did not. He has never asked. It is one of the things they do not speak about.

There is a lull in the conversation, and he does not manage to fill it in time. She surveys her cracked tea set and this lightless garret with a dissatisfied air. "If your father had not squandered all our money--"

Combeferre shuts his eyes.

Lasting the length of a meal in each others' company is a strain they take on rarely. Tea is safer. A meal exceeds the maximum duration she can avoid this subject.

It is true Combeferre's father was not wise with money. He was not much home. He was not realistic about the chances of finding his enslaved family overseas. _Squandered_ is not the word Combeferre would use for it. He would not tolerate that word from anyone else.

As it is, it is getting to be time to leave.

But there are wrongs on all three sides, are there not? The costs of Combeferre's medical school worsened their financial straits. The returns on that investment have not materialized. There was a time when Combeferre would never have forsaken his mother to go to war nor abandoned the career that would have supported the two of them. He has done both.

Combeferre finishes his tea, kisses his mother's cheek, and takes his leave until next month.

\--

> Dear Monsieur Antoine Enjolras:
> 
> Your daughter, E. Enjolras, hired from my establishment four years ago a mahogany writing desk from the Directoire period for 100 francs per annum, a payment upon which she has been in arrears since the third quarter of last year. I have been unable to contact her, so I write to you.
> 
> Please furnish me with the address of your daughter, that I might apply to her to settle the matter. Failing that, I must hold you accountable for the outstanding balance, which amounts to 100 francs. If the desk cannot be returned in a timely manner and in an acceptable condition, I must apply to you additionally for the full value of the desk.
> 
> If we cannot reach an accord, I shall be forced to pursue legal action, including whatever investigation into the matter appears warranted. It would please me greatly to avoid such measures.
> 
> Respectfully,  
>  L. Martin  
>  Martin Furniture Company, proprietor  
>  50-52 Boulevard de l'Hôpital  
> 

Combeferre lays down his pen. Yes, of course it is beneath him--very far beneath. What choice does he have? He wrote to the Enjolrases last December, asking if they knew anything of Enjolras's fate. They never answered.

The desk is real enough. If Enjolras's parents were involved in disposing of his possessions, they will recognize it. No receipt will contradict Combeferre's claim, for it originally belonged to Courfeyrac's aunt.

He wants Enjolras's whereabouts. Failing that, he wants proof of death. If nothing else, any reply to his correspondence must give him some sense of Enjolras's father's character.

Enjolras never spoke of his father, though he would mention his mother on occasion. Combeferre had avoided the words "daughter" or "son" in the earlier letter. The former he could not bear, and the latter would only antagonize them. He has grown more desperate since.

Enjolras's parents used to visit annually, usually in the autumn. Enjolras would vanish from his friends for the duration, and when he reappeared, he always reminded Combeferre of the bare, blasted ground after a forest fire. He barely spoke, and it took days for expressions to return to his face.

This was the price of impersonating the Enjolrases' daughter.

Combeferre has no fond feelings towards Enjolras's parents. He regrets the letter for the moral degradation inherent in writing it. On Enjolras's father's account, he does not give a damn.

He rises and paces the room. He signed a false name, but his own address seems anonymous enough. His landlady is too desperate for tenants to object to his receiving mail pseudonymously. Judging by hints she has dropped, past tenants did worse.

Combeferre rereads the letter and is satisfied with his work. He mails it on the way to Courfeyrac's.

\--

The hour is late, and the candles burn low. The fire is a dull red, barely casting light anymore. The socket of another wick drops, there is a hiss, and the room ticks another candle closer to darkness. 

Combeferre's eyes are falling shut. He does not encounter good wine often anymore, and he miscalculated. Courfeyrac is considerably less inebriated, for he has been notably careful of late. Combeferre wishes he had had that foresight.

Courfeyrac has been regaling him with tales of the balls he has been attending. There is little news, but Courfeyrac has a genius for stories that have no earthly reason to be told except to hear Courfeyrac tell them. Combeferre, who rarely laughs, has been laughing until his stomach hurts.

Courfeyrac runs out of stories. He is lying at full length on the sofa. Combeferre sits on the floor with his head against this sofa. The ornate wood carving under the cushion digs into his neck. He cannot recall how Courfeyrac ended up with the superior surface, nor yet why he himself did not take a chair instead of the floor. He is not currently inclined to change position, so it will have to do. In the flickering candlelight, he is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of stripes in Courfeyrac's decorating.

"Has anybody mentioned to you," Courfeyrac says suddenly, "this damnably odd business with Cosette's father?"

"Madame Pontmercy's father? No."

"Interesting fellow. No, 'interesting' isn't the half of it. You've met, you know."

"Oh?"

"At the--" Courfeyrac breaks off in a way Combeferre recognizes. It is a glottal stop that may as well be a word.

"Yes," Combeferre says.

"He was the old man. Not Mabeuf, the other old man. The good shot, the strong fellow."

"He carried me to the basement of the Corinth."

"Cosette's father."

"Good God." Combeferre sits up to stare at him.

It falls into place for him a moment later that he encountered this old man months ago, lost and confused. He left him to his fate.

Another moral crossroads, Combeferre thinks. Another possibly wrong choice. He stares backwards across such a long succession of dubious roads it makes him dizzy.

Courfeyrac grins and scrambles to sit up. The wildness of the grin carries the terror of the thing of which they are speaking and not speaking. He breathes fast just alluding to the barricade, but still he is grinning, because he is Courfeyrac and there is a story.

"That's not the half of it. That's just the setup to the damnably odd part."

In sitting up, he has ceded the far end of the couch. Combeferre takes it in hopes that physically lifting himself off this floor will do something for his frame of mind.

"Well?"

"Have you ever noticed--I'd prefer to put this delicately, so please don't make too much of the observation. But--have you ever noticed Marius Pontmercy can occasionally be a bit of an idiot?"

Combeferre maintains a carefully neutral expression. Courfeyrac bursts out laughing.

"Oh, all right! Just don't say it out loud. I'm fond of you both, and I don't want to fight."

"Very well."

"So I got out of prison--" Courfeyrac abruptly stops laughing. "Home, the family, I love them to death, you know that. But they were so happy and grateful I was alive--I left as fast as I could. And you, well, you remember. And I thought that was it. That was how the world was now. It would always be as hard to bear as that."

Combeferre wishes profoundly he had more of his wits to hand, that his head were clearer and his heart less heavy.

"What changed?"

"Marius. It was good to have somebody who understood, you know? Not that you didn't--" He frowns at Combeferre's face in the dim light. "I'm hurting your feelings."

"No."

"Stop that. Yes."

Combeferre turns and stares at the fire, terribly tired, feeling the past year like a crushing weight. Whatever eloquence Enjolras and others once attributed to him, he is not managing to muster it.

"I am only sorry," he says after a pause, "that it could not have been me. My presence made everything worse, and then I left. I failed you utterly."

"Damn it all, this is not the mood I was aiming for! We have quite upset the conveyance, tonally speaking. I'm fixing it. Come here."

After some fruitless protestations that everything is perfectly fine, Combeferre allows himself to be rearranged. He ends up with his head on Courfeyrac's knee, and something intangible improves. The room seems no longer oppressive. His head feels no steadier, but his heart does.

"You've comprehended the notion I have two best friends?" Courfeyrac punctuates speaking with emphatic little taps on Combeferre's shoulder, the one without the scarring. "Mind you, you could both make my life easier by getting along, but I'll settle for neither of you gazing dolefully at me like you might one day be supplanted. I'm honestly unclear how one even would replace you with Marius! The reverse sounds equally unsettling."

"Mm," Combeferre says, shutting his eyes.

"Shall I understand that to mean, _'Yes, Courfeyrac, I have understood myself to be good, irreplaceable, and dearly loved'?"_

"Mm."

_"'Yes, Courfeyrac--'"_

"Yes, Courfeyrac."

"Excellent. Story?"

"Please continue."

Courfeyrac settles in his seat, jostling Combeferre's head slightly, and resumes.

"So, soon enough he brought me home, I met the family, and all went swimmingly."

"I will never understand."

"It went well for me, is my point. But there was some secret unhappiness in that house, and--it terrified me, Combeferre. I didn't want anything or anyone that was hiding some kind of secret sorrow, please God, not after--" That glottal stop again.

"But it was Cosette. And if I was brave enough to face a goddamned," he swallows but actually says it, _"barricade,_ and not brave enough to face a woman as sad as Cosette was--I wasn't brave at all, was I? So I pulled Cosette aside, and she told me the most preposterous story of how she grew up.

"There's a man she calls her papa who might or might not really be her father, who stole her as a child from some dastardly innkeepers and who possibly knew her mother. He sounds like a saint when she describes him, serving the poor, charity all the time, always gentle, always kind. But they only ever went out at night. Then some sort of monstrous lady was chasing them--Cosette admits she may be misremembering that--and her father scaled a giant wall like magic--again, a small child's memory--and they broke into a convent that somehow had her uncle in it, and they lived with him five years, but her father had to wear a bell. Everything was fine after they left the convent, except her father kept three houses and they never spoke to anyone and she slept in the houses and he lived in a shed out back."

"What?" Combeferre says, opening his eyes.

"That's what I said! But that still wasn't the damnably odd part, the damnably odd part was, he'd recently gone missing."

"Missing?"

"Missing! The more she told me, the hazier it got. He went missing ... gradually. He visited her, but less and less often, and somehow in rooms with less and less furniture, even though it was in her house, and it all gets quite abstract, like some fever dream where people's fathers slowly recede into the shadows. Only she wasn't allowed to call him father anymore."

"Courfeyrac."

"I am _not_ explaining it badly on purpose, this is how little sense it made! Here, though--here's the part that turned it around for me. Cosette, like I said, was essentially dying of this. And Marius--wasn't. He wasn't worried. I asked Cosette what the family was doing to find the poor old man, because I assumed he'd undergone some mental decline. She said they were doing--nothing. She would talk to Marius, and Marius would say vague things about moving on.

"Combeferre, do you know--have you any idea--how few people have less business telling other people to _move on_ than Marius Pontmercy? I have lived with him, Combeferre!"

"So you spoke to Pontmercy."

"No! My God. Thought of it, and didn't. I've reasoned with an unreasonable Marius before. I've gotten to like being friends with him this time around, and I didn't want to have to stop. No, I learned the old man's last known address from Cosette, and I went to see him. He tried to claim not to be home, but I went up anyway. That's when I realized he was the man we knew. And that he wasn't missing, he was just pretending not to be home. And--he was dying."

Combeferre fears what is coming. He thinks he missed something speaking to the old man that he should not have missed.

"Dying," he says.

"How old would you say he looked?" Courfeyrac asks.

"At the barricade? Fifty, perhaps."

"This man looked eighty. Or ninety."

Combeferre says nothing.

"It was the same man, I'd swear to it. He looked up at me, and he had the saddest, most lost eyes, and he said--my God, he said, 'Monsieur, has my daughter forgiven me?'

"And I just about yelled, 'Yes, your daughter is dying to see you, I can take you right there this instant, you stupid old man!' I didn't say the last part. But the old man shook his head, kind of feeble in the bed there--and he carried _you_ like a sack of flour a year ago--and said, 'No, her husband. Her husband will never forgive me.'

"And that," Courfeyrac says, _"that_ was when I went to have a talk with Marius."

"And?"

"And Marius tried to tell me it had all been 'imparted in confidence' and used some ridiculous legal terms, and I said, 'a man is dying, you imbecile!' and eventually it came out Cosette's father has something of a criminal record, some ancient legal case about a fellow called Jean Valjean, and Marius had been uneasy about it. I told him, _'I_ have a criminal record,' and he said, 'Not that kind of criminal, the other kind', and I said, 'There aren't just two kinds, you ninny, and you'd have a record too if you hadn't been whisked away by some sort of miracle, how did that happen anyway,' and he said, 'I don't know except a man carried me through the sewers.'

"There was a kind of terrible silence. And then I said, 'Pontmercy, only one person there was strong enough to carry a grown man miles through the sewers!'

"Then Marius turned as sheet-white as I've ever seen a human being turn and fell into a chair. I didn't want to pity him, but in the end I brought him a glass of water. Then he and Cosette ran across town to make things right with her father."

"Did they?"

Courfeyrac heaves a sigh. "Things are better. Much better, really. But Marius is still upset about him shooting the police spy. I told him any one of us could have executed Javert, but he's adamant. I'm not honestly sure he's wrong.

"But the good old fellow didn't die after all, and he and Cosette get to see each other. My God, Combeferre, I glimpsed them in a room together once. I had to shade my eyes, their faces were shining like--I don't know what. But the Pontmercys are trying to convince him to live with them, and he's not budging, he's just staying put in the Rue de l'Homme-Armé."

Combeferre stares up past Courfeyrac at the high ceiling and draped windows. He thinks about how Pontmercy saved Courfeyrac, and Courfeyrac saved Valjean, and he himself saved no one. It is the lives saved that matter, not what part he did or did not play. He is not such a fool that he does not know that.

And yet, there is a rebuke in it. He wishes it felt less deserved.

"I'm glad you were there," he says quietly.

\--

The days of June have waned. Tomorrow, it will be July. That is not a month of benevolent memory either, but no other month is June. It feels like a victory of sorts. Combeferre, such as he is, is still here.

Courfeyrac has insisted on celebrating. It has been over a year since Combeferre last visited a restaurant up to Courfeyrac's standards, and he suspects even his better suit is not suited. For well or ill, he must leave for it soon. He is just dropping off an armful of newspapers at his own rooms.

He is more eager about the papers than the fine dining. It turns out the name Courfeyrac mentioned, the old convict Jean Valjean, is a far more fruitful avenue of research than Combeferre would have guessed. Combeferre does not know what light the old man might shed on the barricade, but he is delighted to be looking into someone possible to find.

He has obtained newspapers dating back to the late teens and early twenties, from a northern industrial town called Montreuil-sur-Mer. He is calculating whether he can peruse just a few pages without making himself late. He rebalances the papers in his arms to reach for the door handle.

"Well," says a voice behind him, and Combeferre freezes. "I think you are not a furniture dealer."

The voice is gruff and hard and not easily forgotten, and Combeferre knows he has never heard it. And yet, there is something in it he recognizes--some promise that if the speaker wished it would ring loud and clear as a violin, commanding as the drums of war, and in that respect, it reminds him of--

Combeferre turns.

A thin man stands in shadow, tall and straight, with folded arms. There is a moment when Combeferre thinks it then too, but the angles are too hard, the shoulders too broad, the hips too narrow, and the height just a little too great.

Still, in voice and silhouette M. Enjolras resembles his son a great deal.

"Have we met, monsieur?" Combeferre asks.

"I cannot abide cowards."

"Very well. You are Antoine Enjolras."

The man steps from the shadows. In the light, the resemblance is less. His face is not marble but rough-hewn granite, craggy and thin. His hair is dark and graying, and his thick whiskers are grizzled. His gaze is icier than Enjolras at his coldest.

"Consider this a warning," Antoine Enjolras says. "If you continue to harass me and my wife, you will find yourself arriving suddenly at a point where you are no longer able to do so."

He smiles. It does not make his face less cold.

"Where is Enjolras?"

Antoine Enjolras raises his eyebrows.

"Where is your daughter?"

His lip twists. "I have no daughter."

The raw hope must show on Combeferre's face, for Antoine Enjolras's lips pull back in a mask of fury. 

"Nor any _son._ Is that what you are? One of her companions in that--" He breaks off, like any word for it is too distasteful. He looks Combeferre up and down, and his sneer deepens. "With a great deal to hide from the law yourself, I am beginning to learn. You seem to me something of an idiot child, playing games with stones in a glass house."

"That is my business. As is the fate of Enjolras. Where is he?"

"Combeferre," Antoine Enjolras says thoughtfully, and when Combeferre stiffens, he makes an amused tutting noise with his tongue. "To receive letters pseudonymously at an address where your landlady knows your name is remarkably stupid."

"I have nothing to hide."

Antoine Enjolras's granite mouth pulls derisively to one side. He does not deign to comment.

"If he is dead," Combeferre says, "give me proof of death. If he lives, tell me where he is living. As soon as you do, I will leave you alone."

"Oh, you'll leave us alone anyway."

"I think not--"

There is a click, and Combeferre stares down the barrel of a pistol leveled between his eyes.

It is a year thirteen cavalry pistol, easily distinguished from the year nine model by the barrel mountings. It has been kept well oiled and in excellent condition. There is perhaps an edge of hysteria in Combeferre's noting of these details.

"My wife and I have seen more trouble of late than we have any cause to suffer," Antoine Enjolras says. "It would naturally be absurd to lay it all at your door, Monsieur Combeferre, but I think I can reasonably ascribe to you a portion. Desist from harassing us. I cannot tell whether you are at all clever--do you require me to list the reasons why pulling this trigger will not draw me into undue legal difficulties?"

The pistol in his hand is as steady as it was in his son's.

It feels sacrilegious to think that. Combeferre cannot drive the thought from his mind. He gazed upon Enjolras's pitiless face that day and pitied him. It looks different from this angle. 

Antoine Enjolras smiles, a lipless, lopsided gash of a smile. "Well?"

"No," Combeferre says quietly. "You need not list them."

"Excellent." His smile broadens, and he lowers the pistol. "As I said, I would certainly get away with it, but there is always delay and paperwork and irritating questions to answer with these things. If it is all the same to you, I'd prefer not to bother. Can we say we understand each other? You'll leave my family alone, I need not look at your face anymore, and we thereby save everybody from unpleasantness?"

"Is Enjolras alive?"

Antoine Enjolras raises his eyebrows and begins to lift the pistol again.

Combeferre has stared into more guns and the sneering faces of more despotic brutes than he can count. He chides himself that this should not trouble him.

It is troubling him.

It is that imperturbable coldness. It should not feel familiar, and it does. He stares past the gun into the icy blue eyes, holding tight to the rage that keeps him calm.

"I will send no more letters."

"Good man."

Antoine Enjolras lowers the pistol and claps Combeferre on the shoulder, jovial and insulting. He turns on his heel and strides away down the street.

\--

Combeferre sits at his desk. He has been there some time.

He is trying to divine what it means: whether Antoine Enjolras's actions were those of a man who knows where Enjolras is or a man who does not. His thoughts jumble up against each other, tangled and slow, going nowhere. It irritates him.

He recalls Courfeyrac and dinner. He reaches for his watch and fumbles with his fob for an absurd interval--his fingers are clumsy. Only when he has extracted the watch does he notice the room has grown too dark to read it. Perhaps the incident in the street still troubles him somewhat.

It is dark enough that dinner will be over. It is past the hour he should have arrived at Courfeyrac's for the night.

He imagines venturing outside and pictures Enjolras's father waiting in the street. A pall falls over him, clammy and chill. No, it would not do to go out again. Moreover, Courfeyrac will be angry. Better to make his excuses tomorrow.

If he does not go to Courfeyrac's, Courfeyrac will come here.

Combeferre is on his feet abruptly, though he does not want to be. He is chilled and uncomfortable, and the imagined shadows of the street unnerve him. He rifles in the corner till he finds the cane he stopped needing months ago. It was meant for an invalid, but it is stout and metal-tipped.

If one of them must meet that man on a dark street tonight, he will not let it be Courfeyrac.

\--

"The looks the maitre'd was giving me! I spent over an hour swearing you were going to arrive any minute! A note, Combeferre! Anything!"

Courfeyrac is angrier than Combeferre has seen him in some time. He paces irritably while Combeferre stands in the doorway. All Combeferre can think about is how good it is to have reached here and found him safe.

Courfeyrac finally gets a good look at Combeferre's face and the rant dies on his lips.

"Dear God," he says. "Combeferre?"

Combeferre embraces him. He had not realized how unsettled he was until he is holding onto Courfeyrac with such urgency he might more easily amputate his arms than let go. Courfeyrac is demanding answers with escalating panic.

"Tomorrow," Combeferre mumbles. "Please."

Courfeyrac stops. "All right."

Combeferre sighs with profound relief and buries his face in Courfeyrac's shoulder. His mind has been filled for hours with looming shadow and imminent threat; gradually his awareness shrinks down to this sitting room with its shaded lamp and low fire, and the two of them, somehow still alive. Courfeyrac's hand moves up and down his back. Combeferre discovers he is very, very tired.

"Is it after midnight?"

"I think so. Why?"

"It's July."

Courfeyrac exhales a breathy laugh and leans against Combeferre's shoulder. "My God, Combeferre. We actually managed it. We survived June."


	6. Farouche

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Gender dysphoria, transphobia, misgendering, homophobia, internalized transphobia and homophobia, torture mention, drug addiction mention, creepy 19th century medical ethics mention, discussion of 19th century surgery, terrible chest binding techniques (criticized), character having difficulty breathing, violence (barricades, non-graphic).
> 
> Hey, all! I wanted to note the gender dysphoria tag on this chapter--I think it's shown up in my content warnings before, but there is significantly more of a portrayal of it this time. Take care, everybody. (And you all know not to bind with bandages, right? Don't bind with bandages.) --Noel

_June, 1827_

As the Friends of the A B C formed, Combeferre put himself at the heart of it.

He was gloriously busy in those days. He collaborated with Feuilly teaching literacy, and he sparred with Bahorel. With Prouvaire he argued social questions, and with Courfeyrac, political ones. With Enjolras he argued everything and anything.

Outside the group, there were lectures, rounds, clinic, dissections, studying, and pouring his energy into mastering the great work of saving lives. The world was wondrous and opening before him, history and philosophy and humanity, stones and insects and stars.

And tonight's meeting had been excellent.

Courfeyrac had ranted again about Charles X's dissolution of the National Guard--Bahorel had grinned like a demon and called it an opportunity. Combeferre explained how the king's restrictions on suffrage had accidentally created transparency in the voting rolls, making voting harder to suppress--as a consequence, liberals were registering a glut of new voters. Enjolras opined that everything liberals did was merely a stopgap delaying revolution.

"As progress inches forward," Combeferre replied, "the oppressions of yesteryear become unimaginable. In scouring the charter for loopholes to bolster his authority, Charles reinforces the charter. True absolutism is ended, and good riddance. The slow river of history flows on. Even these moderate liberals feed the current. When they have done their part, we will flow beyond them to greater truth."

"Your slow river is a fairy tale." Enjolras paced the back room of the Musain, all flashing eyes and eager energy. "It postulates a gentle curve from 1788 to now, as if peace could have brought us here! You admit 'eighty-nine was necessary? So was 'ninety-three! We plunged headlong into the future, and now they drive us back. If we do not force forward motion, we will backslide."

"I am not advocating passivity, I am advocating less violence. When progress is gentle, it is not so violently repudiated."

"It is foolish to think we will accomplish it without violence."

"No," said a quiet voice behind Combeferre. "It is foolish to think violence begins when we take up arms. Every day, governments commit atrocities of action and inaction against their people. They suppress the stories, but the people remember."

Combeferre turned--it was Feuilly. Feuilly rose with an apologetic smile and picked up his hat.

"I'd talk more, but I have work early. Good night."

\--

The other men stood in a knot of talk and laughter. Combeferre was packing up. It little mattered what amused them--it was after midnight, and his rooms were not close. Enjolras sat listening in his corner, quietly content.

"Join us!" Courfeyrac called to Combeferre.

"Clinic in the morning."

"Oh no!" Joly said. "Don't mention clinic! You'll make me regret what I'm about to do."

Combeferre smiled and kept packing.

"No, really!" Courfeyrac cried. "Get your head out of the clouds and books, Combeferre! Come with us to my rooms--I wish to talk to you like we're not in a lecture hall. We'll get you drunk and learn what you say when you aren't rattling on like a textbook!"

Implicit in this were several observations Combeferre disliked, not least because they were true.

"I assure you," he said, shouldering his bag, "alcohol in no way mitigates that tendency. I'll spare you from having to learn it firsthand."

A fleeting shadow crossed Courfeyrac's face.

"We would enjoy that too," someone murmured. 

Combeferre turned to find Prouvaire watching him, amused. As a consequence of wanting to draw nearer, Combeferre backed away.

"I really do have to--good night."

He fled.

\--

As he descended the back stairs, someone slipped out after him.

"I wanted to revisit my proposal from last week," Enjolras said. "That is, unless you are avoiding me too."

"I'm not avoiding them, I'm sparing them. My point about alcohol is not untrue."

"Perhaps not."

"And clinic is at six."

Silence followed, broken only by their footsteps. Combeferre glanced back to find Enjolras regarding him thoughtfully. Combeferre scowled and turned his eyes forward.

"I prefer fighting with you to watching you look superior about my shortcomings. Make your case."

Enjolras never took offense at ill temper. He shut the gate carefully behind them, and they proceeded in silence down the Rue des Gres towards Combeferre's rooms.

"Apologies," Combeferre said after a block or two. He held his arm for Enjolras to take, which Enjolras did. "You were saying?"

"It is a significant walk from your rooms to mine. Mine are considerably closer both to the Musain and the medical school."

"I admit the point."

"You frequently undertake the journey carrying a backbreaking weight of books. Even then, we are forever across town from the book we need."

"You are proposing I move in with you to consolidate our book collections?"

"We would amass knowledge and foment change far more effectively under one roof. We waste hours on the commute."

"It's not bad exercise."

"Take up boxing. Fencing." All Enjolras's notions of exercise were martial. "Singlestick. Savate. Anything but dragging a small library halfway across Paris! I never needed a separate study. If this is about negotiating the rent--"

"It's not the rent."

"All right."

It was not that Combeferre did not want to.

He examined Enjolras's profile, lit dimly by the ruddy glow of a nearby lamp. Enjolras kept his gaze ahead, allowing Combeferre to scrutinize him without being scrutinized.

"I'll not force the issue if you really dislike it," Enjolras said at last. "But your reasons are not your reasons, and I cannot discern why."

Combeferre returned his eyes to the quiet street. "You really are serious?"

"What alternative explanation can you have for my repeatedly suggesting it?"

"Very well, then. Yes."

Enjolras arrested his stride. "Do not let me badger you into it."

"I like the idea."

"And have reservations."

"Yes."

"That you will not tell to me."

"No."

"But your answer is--"

"My answer is yes."

\--

_September, 1827_

The summer's heat had faded, and the air smelled of woodsmoke. The first yellow tinges on the leaves glowed in the lamplight and fading sunset like tips of flame. Combeferre was walking with Jean Prouvaire.

They strolled slowly, arm in arm, close enough that Combeferre felt the expansion of Prouvaire's ribs as he breathed. The pressures and gestures of Prouvaire's ever-restless hands mesmerized him. It was not the first time they had walked thus.

Combeferre dared tell no one of it, not even Enjolras. Instead, he found himself recounting to Enjolras entire conversations, as if "Prouvaire said..." could substitute for unburdening his heart of the wonder and terror. He was concealing this nascent miracle like he was ashamed of it.

Because, of course, he was.

Prouvaire let go beneath a streetlamp, doffing his hat and gazing up at the shivering leaves of the huge beech looming over the firelight. In his pale eyes one could see the lines of poetry forming.

"Tell me of your writing," Combeferre said.

Prouvaire flashed a quick smile and retook his arm. He kept his hat in his hand. "I think--" His cheek reddened. "You may hear more soon enough. But not yet. What do you love like I love poetry?"

"Many things." Combeferre corrected himself. "Medicine."

"Medicine." Prouvaire chewed his lip as they passed beneath another lamp. "There is some alchemical interference in the air between us. It was a glorious word when your lips formed it. It reached my ear quite changed."

"You think poorly of medicine."

"I think poorly of quacks, pastilles, violent purgatives, and blood drained by the false confidence of fools. I think poorly of profiteers hawking strong spirits and opium as panaceas."

"Ah."

"Shall you tell me you are not one of the fools?"

"I cannot claim that."

"Good. The fools usually do."

"Your criticism is just."

"And hard won." Prouvaire's grip on Combeferre's arm was tight. "Do you know," he said, "they sell systems of bells and pulleys one can string from one's family mausoleum into one's home? So if there is a premature burial, the family will hear and intervene."

"Has that saved lives?"

"I suspect not."

They reached the river. Combeferre turned towards the quay, but Prouvaire drew him onto the bridge.

"Such a bell was affixed over my bed growing up. The idea was not mine. My mother has a certain fear of death--no, most people fear death. My mother fears it more than most people.

"I grew up in a decaying villa on a vast estate where no one lived but me, my mother, and a few servants who avoided us. We are wealthy--wealthy enough to retain a number of physicians. My mother was always of a nervous disposition. But certain prescriptions claiming to alleviate the symptoms--" That quick smile flashed again, wryer. "--have done the reverse, though I cannot persuade her of it. My views on the frequent use of laudanum are equal in intensity to hers. They are only--"

Prouvaire broke off.

"Opposing ones," Combeferre said. "I'm sorry."

Prouvaire gazed thoughtfully over the parapet at the turbulent currents, opalescent gray in the dusk.

"I don't think I can be sorry. How could I wish to remove what forms the substance of me? It would be to supplant myself with a stranger--to replace my eyes with wood and my heart with stone. I cannot wish myself unmade. Will you tell me?"

"Tell you?"

"About medicine as you mean it. If anyone has the power to make the word beautiful, it is you. Tell me."

The bridge and nearby streets were empty. The only sound was the dull rush of the Seine. Combeferre glanced once more at the street and stepped close.

"There are true cures," he said. "There are treatments that work. We have not found them all, we have not found nearly enough. We are flawed men fumbling in the dark, and many of us think too much of ourselves, and many of us are fools."

Prouvaire shut his eyes. He was as tall as Combeferre but thin; his eyebrows and eyelashes were of russet so deep as to be bloody-hued in this light. He wore his hair wild and longer than the fashion, and it grew wispy at the temples where his hairline had begun to recede. He smiled, crooked and beautiful, creasing his thin, red-stubbled cheek--the urge to kiss him caught Combeferre with such breathless force it seemed stronger than the current of the river.

"But science," Combeferre said, "strict methodology, falsifiability, the rigorous testing of a hypothesis--year by year, even foolish, flawed men lessen the darkness. For all our mistakes, there is truth. We are finding it."

He brushed his thumb over Prouvaire's lip, hoping to ameliorate the impulse to kiss him. He achieved the reverse. He must have made some sound, for Prouvaire's smile broadened.

Streets have eyes. It would have taken no remarkable discernment to infer from Combeferre's languid body and intoxicated gaze things men had been killed for. Legal, yes--but hatred sleeps fitfully. Combeferre wanted to damn the hatred of Paris here on this bridge, and he wanted to cower and hide, and the consequence of his confusion was an absurd trembling he could not stop.

Prouvaire laid a hand on his back, steadying him. Combeferre stroked his thumb across the smiling crease in Prouvaire's stubble-rough cheek, still vainly attempting to propitiate desire with safe compromises.

"We will find it," he breathed.

"You know--" Prouvaire's smile grew yet wider. "You are going to let me stay over tonight."

\--

Combeferre woke to raised voices. His face was buried in his pillow. His thoughts were hazy with sleep. The bed was still warm where Prouvaire was no longer in it.

Enjolras's was one of the voices, soaring and terrible with that inspired violin vibrato it took on sometimes. The other was deeper. It took Combeferre a moment to place it.

Prouvaire raised his voice so rarely.

In an instant Combeferre had leaped into his trousers and flown headlong into the dining room where Prouvaire and Enjolras were shouting at each other. Combeferre clung to the doorframe and shut his eyes, cold down to his bones. He could dare the hatred of Paris, but not of Enjolras.

He could not hear over the panicked roaring in his ears. He could not look. At length he distinguished the name of André Chénier, the tragic poet executed by Robespierre three decades earlier.

That is to say, Enjolras and Prouvaire were only having the same fight they had been having since the day they met.

The argument trailed into silence. Combeferre opened his eyes to find them looking at him. He was less than half dressed, breathing heavily, and hanging on to the doorframe.

Prouvaire smiled and said he had to be going. He shook Enjolras's hand, kissed Combeferre's cheek, and departed.

Combeferre stared at Enjolras across the dining room table. After a moment, Enjolras poured him a cup of coffee and pushed it over. Combeferre did not move.

"I suppose," Combeferre said evenly, "you will ask me now to find a new living situation."

Enjolras sat up sharply.

 _"This_ is what your hesitation was about?"

Combeferre dropped into a chair and gazed at his coffee to avoid Enjolras's affronted glower.

"Everything you know of me, Combeferre! I have been at your mercy a year! After your kindness with my secrets, you believe I could be cruel with yours? That I would do so to anyone? You think so poorly of me?"

It was a not unreasonable point. It took Combeferre some minutes to speak.

"It is a function of what I think of myself, Enjolras. And what the world thinks of me. Not what I think of you."

"Damn them," Enjolras said softly. "All their lies."

He rose abruptly and went to the tall windows, pulling aside the curtain. White sunlight flashed on the table and Combeferre's untouched coffee. Enjolras stared out for some time.

"You will have realized an analogous demon whispers in my ear?"

"I had not."

"Madwoman," Enjolras said, staring down into the street. "Termagant. Prude. Hysteric. Liar."

"Stop. Please. You know those are lies."

"Yes, well--I don't enjoy seeing you fall prey to it either."

Combeferre picked up his coffee and leaned back, sipping it and growing by degrees calmer. Enjolras remained at the window.

"If--" Combeferre said. "If you can bear the subject, that is, if you are amenable, I should like some time to tell you of--of some of the things I have not been telling you of. That is," he added quickly, because Enjolras had opened his mouth, "not such details as I know to be distasteful to you, nor those that must inevitably bore any but the parties involved, but rather, in the more general sense--"

"Combeferre?"

Combeferre broke off. Speaking was not going particularly well, so he raised his eyebrows instead of risking it again.

Enjolras was smiling. "I should like it very much."

\--

_October, 1827_

"One envies Saint Agatha," Enjolras said.

It was after midnight and into the dark of a Sunday morning. Their neglected fire had sunk low, but they kept the lamps and candles tended.

This sitting room was a wide space of high ceilings, large windows, and walls of overcrowded bookshelves. The furnishings were few but expensive, like everything Enjolras owned. It was a comfortable space once one grew used to its emptiness.

Combeferre lowered his book. Saint Agatha, among other tortures, had had her breasts ripped from her body with iron pincers.

There were shadows under Enjolras's eyes, and his book lay shut on his knee. It had been a risky volume to obtain, and one he had long anticipated. Lines of tension shadowed his cheek and neck, and he jiggled his leg.

Combeferre had been training as a surgeon long enough to recognize pain. He had seen enough fights to know Enjolras's astronomical tolerance for it. Enjolras never broached this topic. Combeferre laid his book aside.

Perhaps this was too much acknowledgment, for Enjolras jumped up and paced with a quick step and a scowl, avoiding Combeferre's eye. Finally, he settled against the mantlepiece, facing away.

"Is it possible?"

Combeferre did not understand; then, with a jolt of dread, he did.

"No," he said.

"Is there such a procedure?"

"For certain cancers. Not this."

Enjolras whirled in sudden fury, drawing himself up and glowering down with bright, wild eyes.

"What objection can you have?"

"Good God, Enjolras! Our methods are hardly less painful than what was done to Saint Agatha!"

Enjolras snorted, as if torture were but a minor obstacle.

"The rates of survival are far lower than they should be. We have no means of preventing infection or mitigating pain. People who undergo these procedures revise their wills and write farewell letters. Survivors remember it only with horror. Only in matters of life or death--"

"If it is?"

Combeferre controlled himself, maintaining neutrality in the muscles of his face.

"I need you to clarify your meaning."

"Oh," Enjolras said, comprehending. "No. You need not fear for me in that sense. But will you do it?"

"I could not."

"Why?"

Combeferre rose, agitated. A thousand arguments presented themselves for why it was impossible. He was too exacting a moralist to believe them. He assisted in more invasive surgeries every day.

What were his real reasons? That he did not understand the problem. That he did not want Enjolras to die on an operating table. That he did not want to be the one who killed him. Above all, that it is one thing to wield a knife with precision on a person screaming in agony and another to wield it on one's dearest friend. Combeferre was not at all certain he had the nerve or the stomach.

Several of the arguments were morally shaky; others, less so. At the moment, he did not feel equal to fighting Enjolras about any of them.

"I am not yet a qualified surgeon."

"And when you qualify?"

Combeferre glanced over the intractable marble of Enjolras's face and prayed that doctors attained some moral clarity medical students lacked.

"You may ask me then."

Enjolras nodded and turned back to the mantlepiece he still leaned on, dropping his head onto his arm. Combeferre retook his seat, watching him with disquiet.

"There is visible bruising?"

Enjolras laughed bitterly.

"May I examine it?"

"Absolutely not."

"May I know your current solution?"

Enjolras did not answer. A candle spluttered out. Neither moved.

Finally, Enjolras straightened, still facing the fire. Stiff-backed and radiating fury, he undid his cravat and began unbuttoning his waistcoat. He threw it on a chair, unfastened his braces, then dragged his shirt off over his head and threw it aside also. He clenched his fists at his sides and waited.

His solution was bandages. They were tight enough to cut into what little flesh he had. Combeferre did not need to remove them to see the bruising, for bruises mottled the skin at the edges of the binding. No doubt worse was concealed.

"You will break ribs," Combeferre said quietly. "With wrappings that tight, on a man as active as you, it is a near certainty. It may already have happened."

"It has not."

Combeferre rose and started towards him. Enjolras went rigid, breathing hard, with fists clenched. The cords of his arms and neck stood out under the skin like wires.

Combeferre stepped back. "Apologies."

Enjolras's panicked stance eased, and he flushed crimson from his cheek down to his shoulders. "I recognize the absurdity of the reaction. It's not you."

"It's no matter. May I make an examination?"

There was silence. Combeferre went to his medical bag and began fitting together the cylindrical wooden pieces of his stethoscope.

"No," Enjolras said.

"There is no way? With the shirt on?"

"I cannot."

Combeferre laid the stethoscope down. He watched the bandages expand and contract over Enjolras's back. "Does it restrict your breathing?"

"On occasion."

"Often?"

"--Perhaps."

"Good God, Enjolras!"

Enjolras flinched again. Combeferre took a deep breath.

"I'll wait until you're dressed to fight." 

"Thank you."

"We are going to fight."

"I gathered."

"Very well. Thank you showing me."

Combeferre turned away to let him dress. From the sound, Enjolras did so in a frantic hurry, as if the situation could not be rectified fast enough.

"All right," Enjolras said.

Combeferre turned to find him slumped in an arm chair, staring at the fire.

"It is a matter of time," Combeferre said. "A cracked rib can lead to a punctured lung. This restricted respiration worries me profoundly. And that is ignoring tissue damage, the dangers of fluid buildup in the lungs, the pain--"

"I know the costs better than you do."

"What you mean is, you know the benefits, and I don't."

"Yes."

"I would like to understand them, if you are willing to tell me."

Enjolras gazed up, pale and tired. "I have no rational defense. Believe me, I have spent years interrogating myself with every question you wish to ask. It is a matter of life and death. That's all I know."

Combeferre stared down at the fire. All his training told him to fight. Whatever right to self-determination human beings had, it did not apply in medicine. Doctors had jurisdiction over patients in matters of health, and a medical student was nearly a doctor. Combeferre wanted to argue until Enjolras changed his mind. He wanted to fetch scissors and cut the bandages off by force. He had every right to press the matter. Every doctor he studied under would have advised him to do it.

But that was a lie, was it not?

The doctors Combeferre so admired would have taken the matter out of his hands--he was only a student after all, and biased. Certainly they would have made Enjolras renounce the bindings. If persuasion did not suffice, they would have resorted to threats, force, trickery, opiates--and after that! What a curious nervous malady. What a tragically afflicted young woman! What a fascinating case study--it might be enough to make a man's career. Meanwhile, Enjolras would, of course, be treated benevolently. In La Salpêtrière, perhaps.

Combeferre listened to the pop and hiss of the logs. The room behind him was silent. He turned back at last.

"I believe you," he said.

Enjolras bracing for battle was a familiar sight--Enjolras weak with relief was not. He gazed up with the glassy stare of an animal that feels teeth at its throat and stops fighting. It would be a lie to say Combeferre did not feel much the same. With slow care, he took the seat opposite.

Enjolras rested his head against the wing of the armchair and shut his eyes. Tears ran down his cheeks and dripped from his chin. Combeferre sat up in alarm.

"Is there something I should--?"

"Stay," Enjolras said. "If you would."

Combeferre settled back. The coals had sunk into a pink sunset beneath a gray snow of ash. He watched them shimmer in the growing dark, listening to Enjolras's soft weeping. The candles extinguished one by one. For all its strangeness, it was a comfortable quiet. They were still sitting that way when the first gray light of dawn gleamed between the curtains. 

Enjolras shook himself, wiping his face. "I apologize. For keeping you up, at least."

"I will look into the matter," Combeferre said, rising. "There must be something that will meet your requirements without such pain and risk. Would you accept such a solution?"

"Gladly."

Combeferre paused. "I have laudanum, if you wish. For the pain."

"I should have to take it daily. No."

"All right. Good night, my friend--or day, or whatever it is. I'm going to bed."

Enjolras met his eyes.

"Thank you," he said.

\--

_November, 1827_

For the first time since the Revolution, soldiers opened fire on the people of Paris.

Combeferre had not been there, nor had most of the others. They heard it from Feuilly the next day: How workers had gathered after the election to celebrate the trouncing of Charles's attempt to pack the Chamber of Deputies with ultraroyalists. How they had stormed the police station, and how, as the riot intensified, they had built barricades up and down the Rue Saint-Denis. The workers had been armed only with stones. The soldiers had shot into their midst and cleared the barricades.

"We rebuild tonight," Feuilly said.

"We will be there," said Enjolras.

\--

They convened after dark in the Rue Saint-Denis. It was a strange crowd in which Combeferre found himself: workers mostly, full of curiosity, gaiety, and a will to fight. He had brought his medical bag and bandages. He had filled a sack with stones. He had sworn not fire a gun, and he was in little danger of doing so: their side did not have many.

 _"Lampions, lampions!"_ cried the street children, dashing among the men and women. They flung rocks at all the darkened houses. It was effective: the inhabitants kindled candles and lamps in the windows above the barricades, shedding light to see by.

The materials for barricades lay scattered in the streets, uncleared from the day before. Combeferre stacked paving stones alongside many others. In the midst of the Rue Saint-Denis, barricades rose.

They sat for hours, some talking, some laughing, others tense and waiting. The night seemed interminable. Suddenly, the laughing insurgents fell silent. Combeferre heard the tromp of feet and hooves beyond the barricade. There was a vast clinking of metal and the squeak of leather in the dark.

Nothing happened. Then they were in it.

Soldiers fired, people screamed, and Combeferre flung stones as fast as his arms could swing. He could not see the men they fought, only darkness that flashed with gunfire like fireflies. He smelled gunpowder and sweat, he heard bullets pinging off stones and buildings--and he heard screams when bullets hit elsewhere. He heard his friends: Courfeyrac's laughter, Bossuet's wry comments, Joly remonstrating as if authority might be made to see reason. Feuilly's long silences interspersed with sudden shouts. Bahorel's roars. Prouvaire's outraged cries. Over it all soared Enjolras's voice, tremulous and furious and heart-stopping.

Soldiers rushed the barricade. They fought hand to hand, bayonets and sabers against fists and stones. Combeferre's back ached, he could hardly lift his hands, and still he kept flinging. The charge dropped back, somehow. It seemed impossible the next charge would.

Combeferre stepped away to tend the wounded, ceding his place to a fresher man. He passed Enjolras in the dark and quiet beneath the barricade.

"We will not win this," Combeferre murmured in his ear.

"No," Enjolras said quietly. "We do not throw off the shackles of monarchy tonight. We test the muscles that one day will."

\--

The barricade fell and they ran.

They dashed up the Rue Saint-Denis and then down the Rue du Cygne, where Combeferre's mother must be wondering at the gunfire. They turned right up the tiny Rue Mondétour, pursued by a pack of gendarmes. 

Combeferre was counting their men: eight including himself, all friends of his, that was good--then he realized one was Grantaire, who not been in the fighting. Combeferre had no idea how he had arrived. If the eight included Grantaire, someone was missing.

Combeferre's stomach dropped. He turned.

A figure leaned against the wall fifty yards back. He stood bent over, with his hands on his knees. Even at a distance, Combeferre saw him struggle to breathe. Faint candlelight from a window above shone ghostly on his fair hair and the deadly pallor of his face.

Enjolras.

The gendarmes were reaching him. Enjolras did not raise his head.

Combeferre pelted back. He would grab Enjolras and run, or he would fight the gendarmes--he had no plan and did not care. There were shouts behind him. He did not heed them.

Enjolras looked up. He saw the gendarmes and Combeferre. His eyes flashed, still defiant, though the sockets were dark bruises. He held up his hand in one of their signals:

_Do not intervene._

Combeferre cursed him and kept running. 

Enjolras's face contorted like some antique statue of rage. He drew himself up with a snarl, still leaning against the wall, and jerked his head the way Combeferre had come.

Combeferre heard the shouts behind him again. His friends were not shouting at him, they were fighting. He heard Joly yelp.

They had met soldiers at the mouth of the street.

Joly had never been in a fight before tonight. Courfeyrac had not been in one with real stakes. Bahorel aside, the others were little better. Grantaire might be useful or he might be worse than useless--it depended on the state of him, and Combeferre had not had time to ascertain it.

 _"Go,"_ Enjolras mouthed. The gendarmes were upon him.

The image seared itself into Combeferre's memory: Enjolras pale in the dark of the alley, panting for breath, half bent over as faceless men in uniform seized him.

Combeferre ran the other way.

\--

Of the fight at the mouth of the Rue Mondétour, he retained only the sensation of his fists impacting faces. Men fell, he tasted blood on his lip, and he kept fighting. Someone grabbed him and he fought back, but it was Bahorel, and even in the state he was in, Bahorel roaring in his face made an impression. Bahorel pulled him, and they were running again, back the way they had come.

Enjolras was long gone. Of course he was.

A few streets on they reached a wine shop--Combeferre had some impression Grantaire knew the place. _CARPE HO RAS,_ read the writing over the door, like a warning.

They tumbled inside. The proprietor, a man of long, white mustaches, raised his eyebrows. He had a rag in his hand and looked to be trying to close up.

Bahorel slammed a fistful of coins on the counter, staring down at him. The proprietor nodded.

The Friends of the A B C ascended a spiral staircase and fell into chairs around battered tables. An old billiards table stood the corner. It was hours after midnight. They looked around at each other, shocked, muddied, bloodied, and out of breath.

"Enjolras--?" someone asked.

"Arrested," Combeferre said.

There was a long silence.

"It's a first offense," Bossuet said. "That must mean something."

"They can't imprison him long," Joly said. "Can they?"

They could not imprison him at all. Combeferre could not tell them why. None of them knew.

"We'll find him," Bahorel said, folding his arms and leaning over his little table. Mud splattered him, and his lip was bleeding, and still he looked impressive in his brilliant waistcoat, with his face glowing from the fight. "And then we'll hire him an excellent lawyer. He's a young law student from a good family. He's rich, good-looking, well-spoken, and looks about sixteen. He'll get a month, if that."

"We'll canvas the police stations," Courfeyrac said. "And the prisons."

"I'll talk to people," Bahorel said, getting up. "Find out where they're taking the prisoners."

"Good," said Combeferre, rising as well. The problem was sorting itself in his head into a set of necessary steps. "Bahorel, go. The rest of you, we need a list of places to look for him. Paper?"

Prouvaire produced paper and a pen.

"Prisons," Combeferre said. "Locations of police stations. Everywhere else you've heard of prisoners being taken."

They began. Prouvaire took notes. A list grew.

Prouvaire kept glancing at Combeferre--his looks were strange, almost wary. It may have been that Combeferre's manner was not his usual one. It did not much matter.

"Combeferre," Prouvaire said softly. "Are you all--"

"Write," Combeferre said without turning.

Prouvaire did not ask again.

"Good," Combeferre said at last. "We will break into pairs. Those who know the city well, divvy the locations up and plan the routes. Who knows Paris best?"

There was a silence.

"Me, I think," said a hoarse voice. It was Grantaire. Combeferre shut his eyes. "It can't be me. Is it me?"

"It's you," Courfeyrac said. "Grantaire, we need you to focus. Enjolras needs it. Take the pen. We don't have a map, but sketch one if it helps. Jehan, do you have more paper? Joly, Bossuet, help him."

Bossuet and Joly sat on either side of Grantaire. He conferred with them in the quietest voice Combeferre had ever heard him use and began to draw.

"Gamins see everything," Feuilly said. "Give a coin and a description of him to every child you see. Offer a reward to anyone who can tell you anything."

"Everybody," Bossuet said, "empty purses, redistribute coins. We'll all need some."

When preparations seemed in hand, Combeferre slipped away.

\--

The image would not leave him as he hurried down the dark streets: Enjolras pale, with dark eye sockets. Enjolras barely breathing. Enjolras being seized by the police.

Himself, running the other way.

Those bandages Enjolras wore could tighten with movement, particularly the exertions of a fight. Wearing them impeded his breathing, but removing them meant discovery. Nothing good followed discovery.

It was a crime, if a minor one, that Enjolras wore men's clothing. That would compound the crime of insurrection.

Of course, those were only the dangers if the police acted lawfully. Combeferre did not assume they would. Enjolras would rather stop breathing than be found out. It was possible he had already made that choice.

But such thoughts were for later. At the moment, good men were preparing to search every place male prisoners were kept in Paris. They could not be told the secret, for no one was told the secret. But the women's prisons must be searched.

Combeferre saw again Enjolras's chalky face. He made himself focus on the street ahead.

"Saint-Lazare," said a voice beside him. "La Salpêtrière, Les Madelonnettes ..."

It was Courfeyrac. He was listing women's prisons.

Combeferre stopped dead and whirled round. "How do you know?"

"Do we really have time to--"

_"Talk."_

"I'm a dandy." Courfeyrac shrugged self-consciously, making the shoulder of his high-collared, wasp-waisted coat flop open where the seam was torn. "I can tell when a man doesn't need corsetry to narrow his waist or a razor to keep his cheek smooth. All right?"

Combeferre liked Courfeyrac fine. He did not trust him with this. He trusted no one with this. Enjolras's life depended on people not knowing. People knew. If Courfeyrac knew, there was no telling who else would realize. Combeferre was only dimly aware his inferences were growing hysterical.

Courfeyrac swore quietly and stepped closer. "It's all right. Combeferre? Combeferre, I swear to you. I've told no one. And I won't. I know what you fear for him. It scares me to death. Let me help."

Combeferre swallowed hard, regaining control of himself. For some reason, he attempted to smile--the effect must have been ghastly, for Courfeyrac huge eyes grew wider.

"You don't," Combeferre said. "Know what I fear. He was having some ... difficulty breathing. When I left him to the soldiers."

"Dear God." Courfeyrac took hold of Combeferre's arm. "And you weren't going to tell--right. All right. There are two of us in it now, that's good. What's next?"

"The women's prisons. As you said."

"Fiacre," Courfeyrac said, looking up suddenly. "There's one. Let's take it."

\--

It was too early to ask at the prisons, so they asked at police stations. When the prisons opened, they asked there. No one matched Enjolras's description. They moved on to the next prison. The morning wore on.

Courfeyrac's jokes were defiant, puncturing a terror that otherwise felt sufficient to drive Combeferre mad. They traversed Paris by fiacre twice over. They returned to the wine shop where the proprietor, Hucheloup, was taking messages. The others had checked in but had no news.

\--

The sun was high. The streets were choked with carriages and pedestrians, slowing the progress of their fiacre. Sometimes they halted altogether. Combeferre's desire to fight every loafer, vagabond, and careless driver in Paris was counterproductive. The interior of their fiacre had been silent for some time. 

"This is too slow," Combeferre said. "We're better on foot."

Courfeyrac tried to reply and did not manage it.

He was chalky pale, streaked with mud and blood. His pomaded curls had gone limp and were sticking to his face. His cheeks were patchy with stubble. A purple bruise swelled one eye. He looked exhausted and terrified.

Combeferre got up and took the seat beside him. Courfeyrac leaned into him with a sigh. Combeferre rested his cheek against the top of Courfeyrac's head.

"We'll find him," Combeferre said.

He felt Courfeyrac nod. They sat that way for some time.

"You're right," Courfeyrac said at last. "We should walk."

\--

It was afternoon. They were on foot. They had not slept. Courfeyrac kept up a dogged stream of jokes, which seemed to be getting funnier--this was probably more a sign of Combeferre's mental state than the quality of the jokes. He would have despaired hours ago if not for Courfeyrac. Courfeyrac relied on him with equal desperation.

Running footsteps echoed up the street behind them. They turned to see Bossuet hurrying, hatless, red-faced, and out of breath.

"Law school," Bossuet panted.

They ran.

He explained in gasps as they went: The dean had intervened in the arrests of some students. A friend of Bahorel's had seen Enjolras leaving the police station with him.

"Good news," Bossuet panted. "Safer there."

"It's better," Courfeyrac said. "But--"

Combeferre said nothing and kept running.

They stumbled to a halt before a marble-columned university building where Bahorel was presiding with splendid amusement. His laugh was a roar, and his bloodied lip was swollen purple. Passing students gave him a wide berth. Most of the Friends were nearby.

"A false alarm!" Bahorel cried when he saw them. "Delvincourt! I should have guessed. The old monument does this. He'll scare him a bit, or try to, in his Catholic legitimist cant. _'I saved you this time, young man, but the only righteous path is obedience to God and king!'_ etcetera. He'll keep him a few days, then let him off with a reprimand, and Enjolras lives to be arrested again!"

Bahorel was ten years into a two-year law program. He had run afoul of every professor in the school. This was to say, he knew every professor in the school.

"How fast can you get him out?" said Combeferre.

Bahorel stopped laughing. "More friction that way. Could ruin his academic career. You're sure?"

"Yes."

"Ten minutes."

Combeferre nodded.

Bahorel ascended the steps and pounded on the door. "Delvincourt! Your old friend Bahorel would like a word! Make noise," he added over his shoulder. "Delvincourt! Did you hear about last night in the Rue Saint-Denis? You won't like what happens out here if you don't talk to me!"

Combeferre mounted the marble steps and cried to the street: "A young law student is being held here unjustly and without charge for acts of patriotism which..." Across the way, Prouvaire's voice rang out, deep and loud. Courfeyrac darted around with brilliant energy, cornering passing students and talking of injustice. Others of the Friends gathered more onlookers. By ones and twos, the crowd grew.

The door opened, admitting Bahorel and Combeferre.

A young man, probably a secretary, led then down an echoing marble hall, oddly hushed after the noisy street. He knocked on a door, and a voice bade them enter.

It was an ordinary office full of law books. A thin old man presided behind an enormous desk. On the near side of the desk, with his arms folded and his eyes leveled on the old man, sat Enjolras.

"... Still a student in good standing," Delvincourt was saying. "If you tell us who the ringleaders were, we can let you--" He saw Bahorel, and sighed. "I suppose that answers that."

"Certainly not," Enjolras said sharply.

Combeferre was relieved to hear him speak. But something was wrong.

Enjolras's eyes were dull. His pallor was almost gray, though his expression was irritated. His breathing was too apparent, like it took effort.

His hand shifted against the chair where Combeferre could see it. The hand was flat, with all fingers together. It was one of their hand signals, the most dire of them.

_Help._

So Combeferre began to talk.

"Monsieur, the protest outside is growing. I am little judge of these things myself, but there is a great deal of anger in the air. I witnessed young men beginning to pick up stones, right outside this very building."

Delvincourt looked up. "Stones? The workers--?"

The shouts of the protesters drifted through the window.

"The students," Combeferre said. "Unrest is spreading from the workers into your own institution. This incident with this young man here is only fanning it. It seems to trouble them that he is kept here."

"They're taking their cue from last night," Bahorel put in. "The police shut it down across the river, but they've brought it over here. They may be ripping up paving stones by now."

Delvincourt whitened with anger as they spoke.

He sent his secretary outside to confirm it. Apparently the secretary was easily frightened, because he did confirm it.

Delvincourt seemed at last to feel his hand was forced. His lips thinned, and his nostrils pinched. He delivered to Enjolras one last dire warning about his future prospects.

Then he let him go

\--

Enjolras leaned on Combeferre all the way down the hall. His face was bloodless, and he was breathing too hard. Combeferre bore too much of his weight. What Bahorel thought of the matter, Combeferre could not guess.

"Everyone?" Enjolras asked.

"Safe," Bahorel said.

Enjolras nodded and slumped a little more. Combeferre shouldered more of his weight.

"I've fatally besmirched your good-boy reputation, you know," Bahorel said cheerfully. "You're a good-for-nothing anarchist, damned to join the ranks of those whom these hallowed halls barely tolerate. Welcome to the fold."

Enjolras's chin lifted, and he seemed to rally. "My friend, it's an honor."

The hallway seemed endless.

\--

The fiacre jolted and swayed. They were going home.

"What do you need?" Combeferre demanded.

Enjolras lay collapsed across the seat opposite. Courfeyrac sat beside Combeferre.

Combeferre could not remember exactly how Courfeyrac had gotten there--it may have been at his own instigation. He retained some memory of telling Enjolras that Courfeyrac knew. Details were beginning to blur.

"Don't glower." Enjolras murmured. He rubbed his gray, clammy face. "Ten minutes, perfect privacy, and scissors."

"Or I could do it now. That way, you could keep breathing."

Enjolras stared back steadily until Combeferre cursed and looked away.

"I succeeded in loosening it a little," Enjolras said after a moment. "It's not as bad as you imagine."

"It clearly is," Combeferre snapped.

Courfeyrac gripped his hand. Combeferre could not decide whether that was comforting or made him want to scream.

The fiacre rolled on.

\--

Courfeyrac was pacing. Combeferre was staring at the second hand of his watch. Enjolras's bedroom door was shut.

"You tell him," Courfeyrac said, "and I'll tell him too, we'll both tell him. I know a discreet corsetier, a corsetier for _men,_ my God, not every man is shaped like a damned fashion plate! It's the nineteenth century! We know how to do this so people keep breathing!"

"Corsetry." Combeferre looked up, startled. "Of course."

Courfeyrac laughed desperately. "It's been ten minutes. It has to have been ten minutes!"

It had not been ten minutes.

\--

Combeferre knocked, heard a grunt, and entered.

Enjolras lay face down on the floor. He raised a couple of fingers to indicate he was alive. Combeferre shut the door and went over.

Enjolras was breathing in long, deep breaths. His shirt was on, but the long tails were twisted round and not tucked in. Combeferre slipped off his frock coat and laid it over his back. Enjolras mumbled gratefully.

Combeferre sank onto the floor beside him. "I need to ascertain the damage. Cracked ribs. Fluid build-up in the lungs."

Enjolras made a dissenting noise. It seemed to be all the protest he could muster.

"What can I do that won't hurt you?"

"Nothing."

"Enjolras. Please."

Enjolras considered.

"I--will let you touch my back. Through the shirt. Work fast."

Combeferre made his examination gently and quickly. The skin was tender, but no ribs seemed damaged. Enjolras's breathing appeared unrestricted. Enjolras confirmed as much. Combeferre replaced his coat over him. He put his stethoscope away.

He sat back down on the floor. He no longer knew the next thing that needed doing. He stared at the floorboards for some time.

"Combeferre," Enjolras said softly.

Enjolras's bedroom was large. All the rooms in the suite were enormous, and the important point was there was a great deal of floor space. Combeferre lay down with his head near Enjolras's and his body pointing away across the floor. He shut his eyes, drifting. Enjolras's steady breaths seemed the finest sound in the world.

"I--" he said. "I think I need to hear you breathing for a while."

Enjolras reached a hand towards him. Combeferre found it and held tight.

"Can I call in Courfeyrac?" Combeferre asked.

"Please."

"Courfeyrac!" There were hurried footsteps. "I don't think I understood about Courfeyrac. The heart on that man."

"I know."

Courfeyrac flew into the room, white-faced and terrified. Enjolras held out his hand, and Courfeyrac dropped onto the floor beside them. "Oh my God, oh my God, you're all right--"

Combeferre listened to Courfeyrac's broken laughter and Enjolras's long, recuperative breaths. He was not doing better--the deferred hysteria of the last twenty-four hours was coming to collect its debts. Enjolras must have heard it, for his grip tightened reassuringly. The weight of Courfeyrac's head pressed into Combeferre's shoulder. Combeferre let the last of his self-control go.

He must have slept; he woke to gold light from the tall windows on his face. Courfeyrac's head still rested against him. Enjolras still held his hand. There was a feeling in his chest he could not identify, as weighty and immutable as a star in the sky.

Family, he realized at last. That was what the feeling was. Enjolras and Courfeyrac were talking quietly. Combeferre listened a while, at peace, and then he joined them.

They lay talking long after the gold light from the window turned ruddy, after it faded blue, and after it was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> La Salpêtrière - women's mental hospital in Paris.
> 
> Most of my information about the fighting on the November 1827 barricades comes from the couple of pages on them in Eric Hazan's History of the Barricade. They really were located right there!
> 
> (Most of my background politics info comes from the Revolutions podcast, with a smattering of a couple of other sources. That podcast is really nice for a basic overview of what's going on during these periods.)
> 
> Early 19th century mastectomy: The writer Frances Burney survived a mastectomy in 1811 and wrote a letter to her sister describing her experience. This letter is _amazing._ It is also VERY graphic, so be warned. Available here:  
> https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/letter-from-frances-burney-to-her-sister-esther-about-her-mastectomy#
> 
> According to the French wikipedia page on him, Claude-Étienne Delvincourt really did sometimes intervene between his students and the police. I wrote this scene before learning that, and I was very pleased! I know zero details about the real-life circumstances, though.
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr! @everyonewasabird


	7. 7th of June, 1832, about One O'clock in the Morning

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: violence, police brutality, grief, dissociation, transphobia, misgendering

_June, 1832_

Enjolras sits on a bench in a cell in a station house. The only light is one spluttering candle on a table across the room. Blood crusts on his hands, outlining his fingernails, flaking brown onto the floor. There is not water to wash it. He thinks of water and his thirst redoubles. His mouth and lips are perfectly dry. His head throbs like a nail is being hammered between his eyebrows.

A pitcher and a full glass stand on that distant table, glittering and beautiful in the candlelight. He has not had water in days. He has not slept in days. He cannot stop gazing at the water, and he excoriates himself for it. How can he desire anything when the revolution failed and they are dead?

He keeps forgetting. It is always there, the gross upheaval of his stomach, the utter horror. But his brain drifts and he thinks-- _It has been some weeks since I met Feuilly for lunch--_

_Next time I spar with Bahorel--_

_That pamphlet I promised Joly--_

_When I see Courfeyrac I must tell him--_

He floats in that haze of longing and fatigue whole minutes; then he remembers why he is nauseated by horror. He remembers why he is covered in blood. He remembers their bodies laid out side by side.

How dare he forget?

\--

He tries to contemplate it in the broader sense: in the long arcs of history, in progress's slow march, in the work of men who will widen the scope of human society until justice is all-encompassing. What, he wonders, does his small piece of failed revolution mean?

He tries, but the accustomed discipline of his brain fails. In his disobedient mind's eye rises instead Courfeyrac's laughter in the face of cannon fire; Bossuet's teasing; Combeferre's convulsive grip on his hand; Grantaire's final beatific and beautiful smile--Enjolras bends double, breathing in wet gasps against his knees.

He must not flinch. The revolution failed, and France is in more danger than ever. It is the responsibility of her citizens not to cower but to plan their next steps. They must work for the future now more than ever.

He tries to contemplate it, but some part of him refuses to look.

\--

There is an image he keeps wandering into. It is hallucinatory in its vividness, more real than the room. He may be mad, but more likely he is only so tired he dreams with his eyes open.

In the image, he sits in the corner of the Musain's back room, near the fire. His friends are talking and laughing. Half a dozen conversations wash over him, energetic and lovely. They talked of war, but all he felt was peace.

He spoke of love on the barricade. He meant it. He hopes they knew he meant them, each of them--he fears with desperate dread he was too abstract. He meant all people, but so too did he mean every one of them, specifically, irreplaceably--he fears they did not know. How dare he have asked them to die, how dare he not have told them how much he loved--

There is a rusty shrieking. Something is transpiring in the room where he sits. It takes him a moment to return to it.

Someone has opened the cell door. A number of someones: a forest of boots. Enjolras raises his eyes without interest. There are half a dozen of them, in the uniforms of the National Guard. That is to say, they are private citizens with no business in the back room of a government building. But Louis-Philippe's National Guard seems to be allowed everywhere, worse than under Charles. The sergeant de ville at the desk in the outer room is allowing this.

They hold bayonets. Perhaps Enjolras did not survive his friends by as long as he feared. He lowers his eyes.

He knows where he is. This is Paris; he always knows. The fortress of the Grand Châtelet once stood on this site, with its police headquarters, courthouses, insalubrious prison cells, and the horror of its subterranean dungeons. Beneath Enjolras's feet lay damp, fetid, stifling rooms where men strangled in their chains as they waited for death or the galleys.

Those prisons and dungeons are demolished now. Progress has accomplished that much.

The men are not gentle when they seize him. They raise him to his feet and hold back his arms. The tip of a bayonet pricks his throat a little. He cannot make himself care. They are angry, inexperienced fools who put themselves in a cage with a lion, thinking their numbers make them safe--

They are safe. It is not because of their numbers. The questioning begins, such as it is.

"You shot the sergeant of artillery!"

"You ordered the beheadings!"

They berate him for desecration of the dead--a rumor among the National Guard, it seems. They expected to find his barricade full of mutilated corpses. In the absence of viscera strewn about, they have concluded Enjolras hid the evidence. Their irrationality would fascinate Combeferre. _I must remember to tell Combeferre--_

The blows of their fists are almost difficult to notice. The men have brick-red faces, swollen with rage--he cannot imagine they are pulling their punches. His body, he observes, buckles and retches when they hit it. He stands at some remove and so does not feel it.

This is perhaps the sort of questioning they spared him for. He should be angry. Any other prisoner, and he would ignite with righteous fury and strike with the wrath of an avenging angel.

He only feels tired.

\--

"Grant me a day," Courfeyrac said. "Combeferre already said yes. One day to enjoy the spring."

This was about two weeks ago.

Enjolras had been up since the dark of the morning composing a letter to a man who claimed to have rifles to sell. Details of these rifles had become worrisomely fluid during their correspondence, and it was growing likely the man either had no rifles, had fewer or worse than he alleged, wanted more money, was frightened by the police, or was the police. Threading between the possibilities took careful wording.

Enjolras finished the line he was writing before replying.

"You know how little time is left. Every day matters."

"That's my point."

He lowered his quill, rubbing his tired eyes to refocus on Courfeyrac's face. Thin dawn light slanted through the window, casting an eerie pallor on Courfeyrac's smile.

"It's the last day of Floréal, you know," Courfeyrac said. "It's been a busy spring. Who knows when the three of us will next have time?"

Enjolras knew what he really meant. He put away his pen, blotted his work and put it aside. He was not afraid; no part of him was afraid.

When he looked at Courfeyrac, though, there was a feeling in his chest like the ground had dropped away. He reached across his desk and squeezed Courfeyrac's hand. Courfeyrac's grin only quivered a little.

"How did you ever persuade Combeferre?"

"Because it's his day off, maybe the only one this month. And because it's a good idea."

Enjolras would learn later that Combeferre had not agreed. Courfeyrac would go after this and use Enjolras's agreement to persuade him, thus drawing assent from them by identical expedients.

He believes this was the only lie Courfeyrac ever told him. He feels an obscure heartbreak it should have been in the service of so small a thing.

"The three of us, Enjolras. One more good day."

"All right."

Courfeyrac snatched up Enjolras's ink-stained hand and wrung it, beaming, before dashing from the room.

They convened in the sitting room. Combeferre blinked behind his spectacles like he was bewildered to have no work in front of him. His face was as cold as it had been all spring, almost expressionless. He had slept too little and watched too many people die.

Courfeyrac paced, excited and energetic, throwing out ideas. The theater? No--in the shadow of what they faced, fictional drama felt either insipid or needlessly alarming. The countryside? Enjolras could not imagine what they would do in the countryside.

"I suppose all the flowers of May and all the pretty girls wearing them won't--"

"No."

Silence fell, long enough that Enjolras began thinking of what he might accomplish if he were not sitting here. Combeferre kept glancing at his bedroom, where his work was. Courfeyrac's pacing grew agitated as they slipped from his grasp. They had lost the knack for idle days.

"... A museum?" Combeferre said, and then he said nothing else.

Courfeyrac stopped short and stared out the window.

Once, Combeferre would have listed every exhibition at every museum in the city and presented a précis of how each related to his half-dozen topics of current interest. On occasion, he had digressed so long the museum closed before they reached it.

There were no half-dozen topics. These last months, there had been no impromptu digressions into the polarization of light, no lectures extemporized over dinner on the advent of instantaneous electrical communication across continents, no bursting in upon Enjolras's reading glowing with fervor and brandishing pages of mathematical scribblings whose import Enjolras never gathered.

Combeferre's topic now was war. He was as precise and brilliant at it as he had ever been at suturing wounds, at moral philosophy, at amassing the knowledge of a gentler world.

"It's like he's lost his defining irony," Courfeyrac had said to Enjolras privately. "Who doesn't love a man who worries meticulously about finding the most exact truth, the precise kindest way to go about everything? God help me, Enjolras, I have more difficulty with a man who is precise about gunpowder and bullets and the movements of troops." Enjolras had been drawing up battle plans and had not spared time to answer. How dare he not have--

No. If he opens the door to that regret now, he will drown in it.

On this day, on the last good day, Enjolras got up from his seat and leaned against the window beside Courfeyrac. He gazed down at Courfeyrac's face, which Courfeyrac was trying to hide. Enjolras laid a hand on his shoulder, and Courfeyrac leaned against him with a sigh.

"I'm sorry," Combeferre said.

His head was bowed, and he was polishing his glasses. "I know I have been focused lately. I like your idea, Courfeyrac. A day." He put his glasses back on and gazed at them both. "I don't know what to suggest."

"It was just a thought," Courfeyrac said. "We don't need to do it."

The sun warmed Enjolras's back and gleamed white on the curls of Courfeyrac's brown hair. The mild air that puffed through the open sash smelled sweet and green. It was the end of the world, but it was also spring.

"The city," Enjolras said. "Walk with me."

"Not ... business?" Courfeyrac said.

"No."

"Where?" Combeferre asked.

Enjolras squeezed Courfeyrac's shoulder and beamed at Combeferre with such a smile that Combeferre seemed almost on the verge of smiling back.

 _"Paris,"_ he said.

\--

The situation has deteriorated.

It is easy enough not to feel pain--one need only put oneself at some distance from it. That has been manageable.

But the men detect the quilting and boning beneath his waistcoat and grow suspicious. The waistcoat is ripped open and the shirt is torn. They laugh that he is such a dandy as to wear a corset.

This is not a dandy's girdle. It is not a woman's corset either, but it is closer to that: a bespoke and uncommon garment, worn over a chemise. To be seen in it is a hideous sensation of exposure.

It dawns on them what it means, or some offensive approximation thereof. There are comments--one need not dwell on them. The soldiers did not expect to discover a woman in this cell, and it would be pointless trying to explain they did not find one. The tone of their jeering changes, dangerously.

Enjolras never feared death, but he fears that.

In moments of transcendent fury he is a being not of flesh but knives and fire, capable of striking down battalions with his wrath. He abandons his resolutions not to harm them and calls on that fire, lashing out hard with fists and elbows that have felled scores of better men--

His long-neglected body almost fails. He had not known it could. It is an ugly, ungraceful fight, and he bloodies several of them before he wrests himself free and stumbles back, breathing heavily. The terror on their faces would be comical if he could find anything funny ever again.

They hang back like the cowards they are. It will not last. They are armed, and he is exhausted and outnumbered. It matters little. Either they will shoot him, ending this quickly, or they will come at him hand to hand, and--yes, he will fall in the end. But he will take down more than one before he goes.

He rests his back against the wall and waits.

As the cowards dither about murdering him, movement catches his eye. He glances over their heads to the other end of the room. A man has entered.

The man Enjolras thinks he sees is impossible. Momentarily he wonders whether hell is real--but that is absurd. It is far more likely he has gone mad.

Inspector Javert towers in the doorway.

For the space of a heartbeat, Javert stares at the sorry spectacle with his huge nostrils flaring and his gray whiskers bristling like the hackles of a beast. He is massive and drawing himself taller in his fury.

He roars.

The men scatter, but he rounds them up with his big hands and his cudgel, not their blows but their considerable threat. His voice is a bark. He drives them into the outer room, and Enjolras hears him shouting them down. He castigates the sergeant de ville by name and demands names and identification papers from the guardsmen, vowing they will all be disciplined to the fullest extent of the law.

In the relative quiet, Enjolras puts himself back into order. His shirt is torn. He arranges it as he can, buttoning what waistcoat buttons remain. There are enough.

He sways trying to stay upright, so he props himself up against the open doorway of the cell. Everything hurts. He tries leaning his head against the doorframe, but he starts to fall asleep so he desists.

He can see through the open door of the back room out to the entrance of the station house. The reprimanded guardsmen slink into the night with their shakos under their arms. Javert spends some minutes more shouting at the sergeant de ville about bribes, corruption, and prisoner protocol. Enjolras does not really attend.

Finally, Javert dismisses the sergeant too.

Javert stands in the entrance of the station house after the men have left, gazing into the night. His back is to Enjolras. His shoulder keeps the barred glass door from closing. Every door in the building stands open. Every human being but the two of them has gone.

Rifles litter the floor, dropped by the fleeing soldiers. Enjolras gazes down on them, still and silent.

He can put a bullet through Javert's skull and flee. It is his only rational action. He was to have shot Javert earlier. He has no idea why Javert is not shot. Javert will not be kind.

Seconds pass.

Javert keeps standing. He does not turn. He is too old a policeman to have forgotten his prisoner. If he recognized Enjolras--and Enjolras believes he saw that startled flash--he knows exactly how dangerous Enjolras is.

It is justice, perhaps, that delivers Javert back to Enjolras. His hatred of Javert is caustic, like vitriol in his veins. He has never been much given to hate, but, then, he has never watched all his friends die before. Javert was an agent of their destruction. Javert was theirs to kill.

He owes Javert nothing. Not letting men brutalize prisoners is Javert's job.

A minute passes.

And Javert knows now exactly what the soldiers knew. Learning that secret does not lead men to behave well. Javert is not the kind of man to prove an exception. The feeling of Javert's flat gaze on his skin should be the least of the things making Enjolras want to shoot him, and it is not.

He stares at Javert's broad back and his clipped gray hair. Javert has helpfully doffed his hat.

"He could be your brother," Combeferre might say, and Enjolras wants dearly to snap at him, "He isn't." And then Enjolras wants to tell Combeferre, "I'm sorry."

"I'm sorry," he would keep saying, as if there were some number of times he could say it so that Combeferre would believe him and come back. Courfeyrac would come back. They all would come back. They would go to the safe room they set aside and hide together. Enjolras imagines, just for a moment, falling asleep in that low garret with them all gathered around him. Bossuet makes a joke Enjolras is too sleepy to catch, and their warm laughter ripples: Joly's bright laugh; Bahorel's deep one; Prouvaire's, melodic; Feuilly's, soft and rare. Grantaire murmurs something, and Enjolras wakes just long enough to see that broad mouth quirk at him, infuriating and lovely, and then Enjolras's eyes sink shut, for there will be time later to talk, there will be all the time. Courfeyrac's hand rests gently in his hair, and Enjolras lays his cheek on Combeferre's chest where he can hear his heart beat, and it beats and beats and beats and beats and ...

In his mind's eye, Combeferre smiles.

Enjolras jerks awake, still on his feet, exhausted, in pain, and alone. Javert still stands unmoving.

Combeferre has always been right. It would not be justice. It would only be more blood.

Enjolras pushes off the doorframe and stumbles to the table with the water. He drains the glass, fills it again, and drains it again, and again. He falls into the chair and stares at the woodgrain of the table and his blood-encrusted hand.

Paris will forget them. The sun will rise as normal, and people will go about their business. He will live in a world without them. It is such a vast emptiness he almost cannot feel it.

The thud of boots approaches, and Javert storms in upon him, towering, filling the room with swinging hands and anger. He is shouting. Enjolras stares at the tabletop.

"Irregularities tonight! Damn you! The National Guard are one thing, but one of our sergeants--I'd never have believed it! Meanwhile, _bagnards_ are saints! Men are women! Children are cannon fodder! What is _wrong_ with all of you?"

Enjolras glances up. Javert bares his teeth, furious. His eyes are dead and his face is a bloodless grimace. Enjolras lowers his eyes back to the table.

"What the devil did they bring you here for? This is not the place for insurgents! Paperwork and more paperwork--damn you, I had other things to do tonight!"

Enjolras managed two hours of sleep forty-eight hours ago, before the insurrection began. His last sleep before that must have been the previous night; he cannot remember it. It seems impossible there was life before this. He is so tired it approaches delirium. The candle on the table swims behind a wavering halo, as do all the reflections it casts upon the glass and pitcher and Javert's frenetic, jostling buttons.

He is trying to stay awake. Javert is angry and dangerous. Javert stops and shouts down at him sometimes. Enjolras's head droops anyway. Everything is drifting into the background.

"It was your barricade!" he dimly hears Javert roaring. "Why couldn't you give the task to someone who would do it properly? Answer me, damn you--"

A big hand lands on his shoulder, and Enjolras jolts awake, seizing Javert's wrist, mustering himself for battle though his entire body is pain and he has no strength left. He seethes through his teeth, panting, staring up at Javert with blistering defiance. He lacks the strength to throw a punch, but he has fingernails. He will die scratching and biting. He braces himself to die.

Except for his heavy breathing, neither moves.

Javert's face is strange. All the anger has drained from it. The hollows of his eyes are like the sockets in a skull. He uncloses his lips and closes them again. There is a tremor in him somewhere. His startled black eyes glitter oddly in the flickering candlelight. He withdraws his hand slowly.

"I don't harm prisoners." Javert's voice has faded to something hoarse and hollow. "I was not going to start tonight."

Enjolras nods and releases him, regathering his dignity. He sits up and pours himself another glass of water, which he drinks watching Javert. He finishes and puts it down.

"What happens to me now?"

Javert grunts. "You do it to laugh in the face of procedure, I suppose. A damned trick up your sleeve. Any man in your position, it's the galleys or Sainte-Pélagie or the guillotine. But you! Just reveal you're a woman--"

Enjolras is on his feet instantly. Javert's height is remarkable, but Enjolras is tall enough to glare into his eyes.

"I am a man," he says quietly. "You will address me as one. If you wish to ensure I receive a death sentence, take a rifle from the floor and shoot me. But spare me your blathering about the advantages of my position."

"Why--?" Javert growls. "No, don't answer. I'd rather not know about it." 

"Then do me the courtesy of pretending you never saw it."

Javert stands with his arms folded and his lip pushed up. He mutters to himself, in the throes of some internal argument.

"I shouldn't know," he says at last, heavily. "That I know was due to gross misbehavior of agents of authority. I will ... act as if I don't."

Enjolras inclines his head.

"You still generated a damned lot of paperwork, and I need to go do it. You treated me fairly enough as a prisoner. I won't lock you up. Sit."

Lowering himself into the chair is more painful and difficult than Enjolras anticipated. Once he sits, that dazed exhaustion rolls over him like an ocean wave. Before he has thought to resist it, his head is sagging again.

"The--" Javert says. Enjolras looks up to see he has paused in the doorway. "--The next sergeant comes in at three. That's in an hour."

Having delivered this inexplicable piece of information, Javert turns on his heel with military precision and goes out. A chair abrades the floorboards in the outer chamber and creaks as Javert sits. There is the scratch of a quill and the irritable snuff and snort of Javert's breathing. Enjolras leans his forehead on his arm and falls asleep.

He half wakes to the squeal of a chair thrust back. There is a thud of heavy boots on the floor. He should be jarring to attention--an enemy is close at hand. Instead, he keeps drifting, blank and exhausted, knowing dimly something terrible happened, clinging to the veil of sleep because it protects him from--

He remembers.

Grief, it transpires, is horrifically corporeal. Enjolras's body essays a series of useless actions--sobbing, shaking, vomiting--none of which he allows. How crude it is to be absorbed by his own bodily ills when they are dead.

There is a shuffling of paper and footsteps receding. With an effort, he forces himself more awake. Something is happening that does not make sense. The front door of the station house creaks open. Enjolras lifts his head. There is a pause and then a series of loud noises: the sound of a heavy table being moved over rough floorboards and a sharp, metallic clang, as if someone struck a cudgel against a paving stone. Both were loud enough to wake a man asleep in the back room.

Boots thud away, and the door closes.

Enjolras listens. All is silent. He rises to the shrieking protest of stiffened muscles and bruised flesh. He lurches to the door of the outer chamber.

He is alone in the station house. The clock on the wall says it is a quarter to three.

He can vanish into the streets of Paris a free man. He can hole up in the safe room until the hue and cry subside. Later, he can follow up with their contacts in the other groups, learn the scope of the damage and what resources remain, make his own report, plan next steps--

It sounds obscene.

He limps to the outer door. A tall man in a long coat and a flat hat is walking away across the square.

Enjolras feels a presentiment of yet more death, and he does not know why. He is too tired to think. He is beaten and exhausted and trying to hold himself together beneath the onslaught of a monstrous grief.

But everything Javert has done here tonight has been kind to him. None of it makes sense.

Enjolras follows.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm going to try to say this without spoilers: I borrowed a major plot point in this chapter from KChan88's wonderful [Between the Soul and the Star](https://archiveofourown.org/works/17899115/chapters/42254789#workskin) (though everything past that plot point plays out differently!) If you haven't read that story, go read it!
> 
> Hugo describes the dungeons of the Grand Châtelet in the Argot section--it might be the most horrific description of human rights violations in the novel. The Grand Châtelet was demolished in the early 1800s, but the police station where Javert writes his "Observations for the Benefit of the Service" is located on the Place du Châtelet, the square where the fortress was situated.


	8. Some Notes on the Education of Women

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warnings: Almost none! For once! There's reference to some past manipulative behavior, but that's about it.

_July, 1833_

The Saturday morning sun is bright outside Combeferre's window, and the wind puffs warm through the open sash. It must blow from an unusual quarter today, for it is sweet with the scent of the sunburnt grass in the empty lots of the neighborhood. Occasionally, Combeferre will register these circumstances with pleasure, but the bulk of his attention is on a deeper joy.

He is reading.

He has spent his free time these last weeks diving into those newspapers from Montreuil-sur-Mer. His collection is woefully incomplete, but even among his sporadic takings, there have been useful pieces.

He learned Valjean was arrested in Montreuil in July of 1823, so he began his researches there. There were various accounts of the unmasking and arrest of the mayor Valjean, alias Madeleine. They made much of his herculean strength and more of his hidden fortune. One claimed he was cornered at his mistress's bedside and the shock of it killed her. Others were less lurid and more probable.

Having familiarized himself with the end, Combeferre turned to his earliest papers. At first he found little of relevance: Montreuil might have been any struggling factory town. Later, he read of acts of heroism by an unnamed peasant of remarkable strength. Later still, M. Madeleine's factory thrived, and the atmosphere of desperate poverty lifted. Papers began to praise M. Madeleine, the mayor.

This morning, Combeferre reaches the end again. He rereads the accounts of Madeleine's unmasking, then he sets the newspapers aside. He has reserved for the rest of today a keener pleasure.

He slides a brown paper package to the center of his desk and begins untying the twine.

He did not trust the newspaper accounts of the trial at Arras because he does not trust newspapers. Trials, however, have transcripts. Some weeks ago, he ordered a copy of the trial of Jean Valjean. It arrived Thursday, but until now he has been too busy with work.

Eagerly, he unfolds the wrapping and picks up the stack of pages a clerk has copied for him.

The newspapers led him to expect a tale of police detective brilliance, but he does not find it. He does not even find Madeleine. Instead, the hapless peasant Champmathieu protests his innocence and no one believes him.

If they did not discover Madeleine's identity before the trial, when on earth did they?

A witness takes the stand--an Inspector Javert. Combeferre freezes, staring a the name. It cannot be the same man.

As soon as he reads on, he knows it is. He hears in the handwritten dialogue the cadence of a rough voice he remembers too well. He is restless in its proximity. He drums his fingers hard on the desk as he reads.

Javert withdraws and the trial goes on.

At last, Madeleine begins to speak. It seems the police unmasked no one. Jean Valjean denounced himself.

His is another voice Combeferre recognizes: soft, gentle, inextricably bound to the worst day of Combeferre's life. Several times while reading Combeferre curses, lays the papers down, and paces. There are old fractures in his conscience, and they sting.

When he reaches the end at last, he sits back, staring up at his ceiling.

Here in ink and paper is the old man who radiated gentleness in the depths of hell and brought peace when Combeferre believed himself dying. Here is Madame Pontmercy's saintly father.

Here is the man who shot Javert. Abruptly, Combeferre is up and pacing again.

According to the transcript, Javert was a guard in the Bagne of Toulon when Valjean was incarcerated. He served under Mayor Madeleine. Champmathieu's uncanny resemblance aside, Javert may have been the only living person capable of recognizing Jean Valjean.

Until, under cover of Enjolras's orders, Valjean blew out his brains.

Combeferre sinks back into his chair. He is not unacquainted with hypocrisy, and he stopped being innocent years ago. Even so, he could never have imagined that violence.

Has he any business assigning blame? If Jean Valjean had not executed the spy, Combeferre might well have done it. Combeferre shot many men on the barricade. Valjean shot one.

It is not the same. If Combeferre had an enemy of thirty years, he would recuse himself from executing that enemy. The shooting of a spy is an ugly thing, but tainting that act with vengeance and vicious pragmatism is far worse. Combeferre had thought better of Jean Valjean. He had thought Valjean better than himself. He no longer knows what to think.

There is a knock at his door.

There are not many people it can be. Combeferre's only frequent visitor is Courfeyrac, and Courfeyrac inevitably begins talking before the door is open. It must be his landlady.

Unless it is not. In an instant Combeferre is on his feet, full of the memory of Antoine Enjolras.

He owns no guns now and will not own one again. Being shot dead in the next five minutes would not be sufficient to make him regret that decision.

He picks up his cane, hefts it like a club, and goes to the door. He stands to one side lest someone shoot through.

"Madame Burgon?" he asks.

"No, monsieur."

The voice is soft, cultured, and distinctly female. Combeferre is at a loss. He lays down the cane and yanks the door open.

Baroness Cosette Pontmercy stands in the shadows of the decaying boarding house hallway, gleaming in silk and pleats and truly enormous sleeves. Her dress is not a dress for this building nor this neighborhood. She smiles at Combeferre from within the frame of her bonnet, all rosy cheeks and dimples and shining brown curls clustered before her ears.

"Good God," Combeferre says.

"Monsieur Combeferre, I was passing by and I thought I might stop in. What a lovely day it is! Have you been outside yet? You must be sure to, for it is quite the finest day this summer. You may find this odd, but it strikes me that I have been in this building before, on a trip with my father. How are you? It has been too long, you must come by the house again for dinner some time."

Combeferre glances past her into the hall, as if someone will appear there to make this visit make sense. No one does.

"May I come in, Monsieur Combeferre?"

"No," would not be an appropriate or helpful response, and "Yes" is more than Combeferre can manage. He steps aside wordlessly, and Madame Pontmercy rustles into the room.

She looks around for a chair, but there is only the one. Combeferre prefers to visit his friends and not let his friends visit him. Courfeyrac breaks this prohibition frequently, but Courfeyrac is not above flopping onto the bed to make up for deficiencies.

Madame Pontmercy mercifully does not do this. She looks at Combeferre with huge blue eyes and very red cheeks. She is perhaps not in the habit of visiting gentlemen alone, and particularly not gentlemen whose beds are a mere pace from their front doors. Combeferre shuts his eyes, feeling his face turn redder than hers.

Helplessly, he gestures her to the chair. She takes it, and he remains standing.

"Monsieur Courfeyrac told me you are researching," she says, and Combeferre finds himself not at all surprised Courfeyrac is mixed up in this.

"Researching," he repeats. He becomes aware that this is the first thing he has said since "Good God." "Madame la Baronne," he adds, somewhat inexplicably.

Madame Pontmercy dimples prettily. "He says you are researching a great many things, monsieur--but that one of those things may be my father."

"Good God," Combeferre says, sinking onto the bed.

"Monsieur," she says, and she is no longer smiling. "My father has been ill. Monsieur Courfeyrac says he told you. He has been doing better of late, but still he tells me nothing of his secrets. Anyone can see they are breaking his heart. He says I must not worry myself about them, but I am not--I am worried about him."

"Madame--"

"Monsieur, my husband knows some of these secrets too. He also will not tell me. All I know of my past is the one thing my father will say, that my mother's name was Fantine."

Combeferre is a man of carefully cultivated egalitarian thinking. He has long decried the barriers thrown up by social divisions and has endorsed Condorcet's arguments for female suffrage and equality of education. He believes the penalties for sexual misbehavior are exacted upon women disproportionately and hypocritically.

He has spent the last week tabulating conflicting allegations about a prostitute named Fantine. Until this instant, he had largely disbelieved them. He gazes now upon a baroness.

He is utterly thrown.

Madame Pontmercy glows with triumph, for she sees he knows the name.

"Do not ask me, madame."

Even her frown is pretty, more a pout than a scowl, and Combeferre does not know what to do with it. The few women he considered friends in his previous life were either bloody-minded republicans or determined scholars. Neither group resorted much to pouting, at least not at Combeferre.

"It is there, monsieur, is it not?" The papers on his desk have caught Madame Pontmercy's eye. She rises, with her gaze fixed on them. "My history."

"Please, madame."

She notices his hands, upraised as if to herd her away. She flushes and turns resolutely from his desk.

"I did not come to spy, Monsieur Combeferre. I did not come to sneak."

"And yet no one knows where you are. Do they, madame."

"I--no, monsieur. I was visiting my father in the Rue de l'Homme-Armé, and I dismissed the carriage, saying I would walk. I visited you on my way."

"I am not on your way home, madame."

"No, monsieur."

"You surely did not walk here, madame."

"I hailed a fiacre, monsieur."

Her cheeks are painfully red. "I know I am imposing. I know I am not meant to be here. I will have worried everyone, and they will be cross with me. But I cannot lose my father the way I did before. No one else will tell me, monsieur. It must be you."

Combeferre stares up at her from his seat on the bed, at a loss. He met Jean Valjean in the street months ago. Valjean begged him not to tell her. Combeferre had not known at the time what woman or what secrets Valjean meant, but he does now

Valjean had called his daughter's innocence a miracle. He said preserving it was the best thing he had done in his life.

Combeferre stands. He can only hope the choice he is making is less wrong than the alternatives.

"Madame, " he says. "I apologize. I will not attempt to hold the authority of your husband or father over you again."

Madame Pontmercy draws back, wary. Perhaps his solemn manner frightens her, or perhaps she is unaccustomed to such words. She stares up from the shadows of her bonnet with large, fearful eyes.

"And--my history, monsieur?"

"It is a dark one. There are many details I lack."

"Will you tell me?"

"You are certain, madame?"

"I am, monsieur."

Combeferre picks up his notes and begins leafing through.

\--

It is hours later. Madame Pontmercy's back is bowed and shuddering, and she hides her face. Her bonnet lies discarded on Combeferre's desk. His handkerchief is balled in her fist. 

He feels terrible looming over her in this tiny room, so he sits on his bed again. Whatever truth there is in egalitarianism, he took it too far. Egalitarianism too far--what would Enjolras say to that?

He would agree with it. Enjolras always took a dim view of women, an irritating irony Combeferre spent a great deal of breath trying to talk him out of. Enjolras's opinions on the subject have never been useful.

"Madame, I am terribly sorry."

Madame Pontmercy raises her head with a jerk. Her face is pale, blotchy, swollen, and for the first time since Combeferre has met her, not at all pretty. Her underlip tenses, baring her lower teeth. Her eyes fill with something like rage.

"Don't you dare say you regret telling me, monsieur."

He bows his head. "Madame."

"You cannot condemn me for reacting like this, to--to _that."_

"I would not, madame."

"My father and I saw them once, the--those--the chain, with all the--" She cannot say it. "I thought they were not even men." She covers her mouth with a sudden indrawn breath. "Dear God, I asked my father if they were men! How could I--"

"Madame, you are not the cause of this suffering."

Her eyes fly open, full of shadow and fury. "I am the cause of some of it, monsieur."

Combeferre had had to explain to her what prostitution was. He was as gentle and clear as he was capable of being. It will take him a long time to forget the light that went out of her face when she understood.

She looks down again. "I remember them laughing. Over mama's letter. Monsieur and Madame. I was hiding under the table. They had been angry so long that she could not get them them their money, and I was--I was ashamed, that she could never seem to. And at last, she was sending them money. 'She must have-- _finally,'_ Madame said. And she laughed. They said things I did not understand, but I remember that. 'She must have-- _finally.'"_

"Madame."

Madame Pontmercy straightens in her chair. "Call me Cosette, monsieur."

"No, Madame Pontmercy."

"You know what I am. I do not deserve--"

"Deserve!" Combeferre rises and begins to pace. "Deserve! Madame, you heard a different story than I did. A very different--" He turns on his heel to stare down at her. Madame Pontmercy looks startled, as well she might, for she has never heard Combeferre raise his voice. "Madame. Chains are not the fault of the chained."

Madame Pontmercy looks bewildered. She does not understand, for she has no context. Combeferre kneels and takes her hand. It is cold and trembling--far too cold. He gets up again. He has few creature comforts available to him. He pours out a little brandy and hands it to her. Though it is a warm day, he takes his greatcoat off the hook and lays it over her shoulders.

She smiles gratefully, settling in under his coat and sipping the brandy. The impossibility of this situation from the standpoint of decorum gives Combeferre another pang. At length, a little color comes back to her face.

"You were speaking of chains, monsieur?"

He had half forgotten he raised that subject. He finds himself suddenly as shaky as she is. He was angry. He forgot himself. He never raises that subject.

He sinks onto his bed, staring across at her, deciding what to say.

"A man cannot be condemned forever for stealing bread to feed his family," he says, instead of the other thing. "It is morally reprehensible to crush people for being poor or for the acts poverty necessitates. It is reprehensible to crush people at all."

"There were other crimes, monsieur. Committed by--Jean Valjean." She looks bewildered, like she does not know to whom the name refers.

"Your father is the person to ask."

"My father? How could I possibly--and Marius--?" Her eyes go wide. "Monsieur, he will be looking for me! My God--" She looks around as if just noticing the room and the waning afternoon and Combeferre's coat on her shoulders and the brandy in her hand. "He will think--" She stares at him, aghast. "--That something has happened."

"I can take you home, madame."

"Monsieur, I am grateful--forgive me. I do not know how I will ever explain to my husband. He will not be happy I know at all, less that I came here, and that I disappeared an entire day without warning--" She stares at her gloves, creased and twisted in her hand along with Combeferre's handkerchief. "I do not know how to think--everything is changed." Her eyes are huge and stricken. "Marius will be so disappointed in me."

"Then he is wrong," Combeferre says.

Madame Pontmercy looks no less frightened. Combeferre rises, and she lets him raise her to her feet.

"I think, madame, the conversation you dread is necessary. I also think that if you wish to speak to one more friend beforehand, your husband can wait a little longer."

\--

Courfeyrac answers the door looking tousled and comfortably settled in for the evening, with his cravat half undone. When he sees Combeferre, he beams.

"The owl leaves his nest! To what do I owe the--" He catches sight of Madame Pontmercy and Madame Pontmercy's pale face and swollen eyes, and he snaps to attention. No one ever improvised in impossible situations better than Courfeyrac. "Come in, come in!" he cries. "I'm delighted to see you both!"

He casts a questioning glance at Combeferre as he herds Madame Pontmercy inside. Combeferre can only shrug tiredly.

Courfeyrac settles them into his beautifully appointed sitting room, which has multiple chairs and a sofa, is not in one of the worst boarding houses in Paris, and does not have Combeferre's bed in it. Combeferre sinks into an armchair and shuts his eyes, lost in profound appreciation of these facts.

Courfeyrac rustles about finding tea and ordering up food. Combeferre forgot about food. Madame Pontmercy and Courfeyrac chat improbably blithely about the weather and the health of everyone they can think of. Courfeyrac's chatter has been a constant in Combeferre's life a long time, rendered pleasant by a mutual understanding that Combeferre is not going to participate in it. No one directs any comments at him, and he relaxes gratefully.

Eventually, a cup of tea is put into his hands, and he returns to the room. Courfeyrac sits down. Sandwiches have appeared somehow.

"Well!" Courfeyrac says. "The tea is hot, the company is grand, now for God's sake tell me why the two of you look like you fled hell to arrive on my doorstep."

"I--" Madame Pontmercy says. "Monsieur Courfeyrac, you said--he was researching--" She bursts into tears.

Courfeyrac's handkerchief is in her hands in an instant and his hand is on her arm in a way that is both comforting and perfectly appropriate. He is far better at all this than Combeferre.

"When I mentioned he was researching," Courfeyrac says, "I didn't realize--"

"Don't," Madame Pontmercy says between sobs, "say you regret it. Nobody--" she hiccups on another sob "--gets to say--they regret it."

Despite the harrowing of his afternoon and the looming difficulties, Combeferre cannot help but admire her stance on the subject.

Madame Pontmercy gets ahold of herself in a few minutes and picks up her tea. She frowns down into the cup, which rattles a little in its saucer.

"I cannot tell--whom I should tell. There are so many secrets. There is so much shame. My poor father seems to think he must tell no one and go away from me for his--sins. My husband thought it so awful he would not tell me. But my father--"

Madame Pontmercy's lips thin and turn white, curling in against her teeth. Her swollen, tearful eyes blaze.

"No," she says. "My _papa_ is a good man. He is a good man who does not deserve--any of it."

She takes a sip of her tea. "Monsieur Courfeyrac," she says, "I tell you this in confidence, for my father's legal position is delicate. But this is the story of my family."

And Madame Pontmercy begins to talk.

\--

M. Combeferre was right--speaking to M. Courfeyrac has helped. Something terrible and knotted inside Cosette's chest is not yet at peace, but it seems no longer so impossibly snarled. It never occurred to her unspeakable trouble could be lightened by speaking.

She feels better, but she is still hot and tense all over as she alights from the fiacre and stares at the front gate. She has never given Marius cause to be upset with her before, not like this. She feels as wrung out as her crumpled gloves and M. Combeferre's poor handkerchief, and she cannot help thinking she has not yet done the hard part.

M. Combeferre alights as well, pays the driver, and dismisses the fiacre.

Night has fallen, and his rooms are miles from here. It takes Cosette a moment to puzzle out that he cannot afford the fare back and means to walk. She blushes in consternation, but he has already paid, and offering reimbursement would certainly offend him. She thanks him, silently vowing not to let him do it again.

"Madame." He pauses, gazing at the house. "Do you wish me to stay or go?"

Any possible conversation she can have with Marius will be infinitely worse with M. Combeferre present. "Monsieur, I think you had best leave me to--"

Yellow candlelight spills upon them both. "Cosette!" Marius cries. He has pushed open the carriage gate. "My God, where have you--" He breaks off with a startled noise as he catches sight of M. Combeferre.

Cosette takes a deep breath and turns. "Hello, Marius."

Marius's eyes crease with anxiety as he searches her face. He keeps glancing behind her at M. Combeferre. Cosette's stomach twists with a fresh surge of guilt, though it has been twisting for hours. She takes a deep breath.

"I have been at Monsieur Combeferre's, Marius. And at Monsieur Courfeyrac's. Might we discuss it inside?"

She has rarely seen Marius so pale. His lips thin and his eyes flash as he stares up at M. Combeferre.

"Combeferre," he says, in a voice low and terrible.

"Inside. Please, Marius."

"I will take my leave of you then, Madame Pontmercy. Pontmercy."

"You get in here too!" Marius cries. "I want an explanation!"

"Your wife is perfectly capable of explaining the matter."

"Combeferre, so help me--"

"Monsieur Combeferre," Cosette says miserably, "I fear I may have to impose upon you a little longer."

"Madame," M. Combeferre says.

He follows her and Marius inside.

\--

If Cosette has learned one thing over the last two hours, it is that Marius and M. Combeferre both go impossibly stiff when they are upset. If she has learned a second thing, it is that this is extremely unhelpful.

Her heart's deepest desire at this moment is to lock herself in her maiden bedchamber in the Rue Plumet, throw herself on her soft pillow and white featherbed, and cry herself to sleep. Then, tomorrow morning, she would lie abed as long as she liked and afterwards have a large and unhurried breakfast, ideally with strawberries. Finally, when she was ready, she would sit with a quiet cup of coffee in the afternoon sun and begin to think through all this.

Alas, it is not to be.

She is years younger than either of the men, she is haunted by these revelations of her past, and she has no experience mending disputes, for her life has never had many people in it. And still she is the only one who says anything sensible.

Marius is held prisoner by his thoughts in a way that happens to him sometimes, when the world becomes bleak and threatening and he cannot see his way out. Cosette has learned the art of gently letting him be while maintaining a cheerful stance that the world is not really thus, and he always comes back in the end.

She is doing this now. It is failing because M. Combeferre is still here and still arguing.

M. Combeferre's manner of speaking has been getting ever more precise and his face ever colder. The more upset he gets, the more he seems driven to prove himself the most intelligent person in the room. He may well be so, but that does not make it a nice habit.

It intimidates Marius, but rather than admit that, Marius becomes prouder and stiffer and more hotheaded. In response, M. Combeferre becomes ever more clipped and forbidding.

Nothing is going well.

"He told me because I asked him, Marius," Cosette says again, patiently. "He has been researching Papa."

"Your father is none of Combeferre's business!"

"I can hardly be faulted for reading a newspaper," M. Combeferre says, managing somehow to have still less expression on his face. If he had not been so kind this afternoon, Cosette would find him rather horrible.

"Marius," she says gently, "you must see I needed answers."

"I see nothing of the kind!"

"But I did. And I do."

"Your wife bore up with remarkable bravery under a harrowing afternoon. She is to be commended for it, not censured."

"An afternoon in your rooms, Combeferre!"

Cosette considers locking herself in the bedroom and leaving them to it. Perhaps they will be finished by breakfast. 

Either that, or Marius will have challenged M. Combeferre to a duel. She sighs and tries again.

"Marius, I put Monsieur Combeferre in a difficult situation. He was extremely kind."

"Kind! Him!"

"He was very gracious, though he certainly did not wish me there. He told me everything I asked."

"He had no right to!"

"I had every right to do so, just as your wife had every right to ask."

Cosette sighs again. It is not that M. Combeferre is wrong. It is only that she has never heard anyone sound so stuffy.

M. Courfeyrac offered to accompany them back here. Cosette wishes she had let him--at least then there would be a second sensible person. Is it wrong she should think thus of her husband? She cannot help finding his unreasonableness unreasonable, though.

"It seems to me--" M. Combeferre has the air of one beginning a lecture, and Cosette dearly wishes he would not. "--that you impugn every single person unfairly, Pontmercy. I say nothing of myself. Your wife has behaved like an intelligent and honorable person gravely lacking in necessary information. Your father-in-law seems to me an extraordinary man who came to the barricade with no purpose but to save lives."

 _"'Give me the spy Javert and I'll blow out his brains myself,'"_ Marius snarls. "Have you forgotten _that,_ Combeferre?"

Cosette feels the blood drain from her face.

"Pontmercy!" M. Combeferre exclaims. "Good God!"

M. Combeferre had used no such language in the story he told her. They are horrible words, and more horrible still on Marius's lips. Cosette has an awful presentiment everything she is about to learn will horrify her more.

"Javert," she says slowly. "I know the name now, but--Marius, whom are you quoting? Not--but no, my father would never--"

Marius has gone a terrible white. M. Combeferre looks haggard, staring back and forth from Marius to herself.

"You said," Marius says, "you said--you told her--"

"Not that!" M. Combeferre exclaims. "Never that!"

"What--" says Cosette. "Monsieur Combeferre, what have you kept from me? Marius? What is it you're talking about?"

"Nothing--" Marius says.

"Javert was at the barricade." M. Combeferre speaks very fast, and his usually smooth voice is jerky with nerves. "A spy--a police spy--you understand? We caught him, we were to execute him. Madame, you understand--it was war, he was sentenced to death. It might have been any of us who executed him. I had planned to do it myself, I swear to you."

"But you didn't." Cosette manages to keep her voice low. She does not at all manage to keep it even. "Who did, monsieur?"

Both of the men look horrified. It is answer enough.

"My--my--"

"Your father," Combeferre says quietly, "specifically requested the task."

Marius falls to his knees before Cosette, holding both her hands and gazing into her eyes, as ardent as he has ever been.

"It changes nothing, Cosette. You are not the people you come from. I promise you, he could never have raised you as he has if he did not truly love you, for all his faults. It is complicated--people are complicated, I think. Who can know what was between your father and Javert? Yes, it changed how I thought of him, my love. But it will never change how I think about--"

Cosette begins to laugh.

She tries to choke it back, but all this day has been tension upon tension winding up in her chest like a key in a watch. The release of it bubbles up uncontrollably.

In an instant, there are two pairs of hands drawing her back into the chair. M. Combeferre speaks rapidly and with authority--she recalls he was once a doctor. Quick fingers--Marius's--loosen her pelerine at her throat so she can breathe.

She wants to tell them to stop, it is fine, but M. Combeferre is leaning close, tipping brandy to her lips, and she splutters and coughs.

"Good God," he murmurs, "I'm sorry, madame. Breathe. You'll be all right. Take it slow. Breathe."

"I'm--" Cosette says. She manages to push him away and sit up. "Monsieur--and Marius--I'm fine."

She cannot stop smiling. Her smile terrifies them.

"Cosette, my love, I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, Cosette--"

Cosette embraces Marius, laying his face against her shoulder and stroking his hair till he quiets. M. Combeferre stands back, looking not forbidding now but badly shaken.

"It's all right," she says. "Marius--Monsieur Combeferre--it's all right. My father killed no police spy."

"Madame."

"Monsieur, I tell you--I know my father."

Marius makes a noise but recognizes at the last moment he should most certainly hold his tongue.

"We all saw it, madame."

"The body?" she says sharply. "You saw him shoot? You saw this man Javert fall dead?"

"No." M. Combeferre shuts his eyes. There is a pause. "--I have no record of Javert's body being found."

"That is because he is alive."

"Madame--"

"This is exactly like my father! Nothing has ever been more like my father than this! To request to kill a man so he can save him? To take charge of a person in harm's way so he can steal him out of it?"

M. Combeferre stares at her for an endless moment. Then he sinks into a chair and buries his head in his hands.

Marius gazes up at Cosette, bewildered. "But--they were enemies."

"Marius," Cosette says gently, taking his hands. "I know there was a great deal I did not know about Papa. I know how that frightened you. I can only imagine how he must have portrayed himself to you--he simply cannot call himself a good man. I never learned the trick to make him say it.

"But my papa _is_ a good man--the best of men. I know my papa saved Javert's life, because that is what my papa does."

There is a long silence.

"Pontmercy," M. Combeferre says. He sounds muffled because he has not taken his face out of his hands. "You know she's right, right?"

Marius is staring up at Cosette, full of wonder. Slowly, he nods.

\--

It is close to midnight when M. Combeferre departs. Tired as Cosette is, he looks almost worse. She thinks he may be like Marius in the way conversation drains him, for his face is vacant with exhaustion. He barely mounts a protest when she insists on sending him home in the carriage. 

When he is gone, she goes with Marius to their bedroom and undresses. She brushes out her hair as usual, and lies down beside him in their wide bed. He moves towards her, but she asks him not to, and he moves away. She feels him holding still in the darkness.

She spends some time quietly weeping, though not as long as she expects. Then, she stares up at the dark curtains and thinks.

She must talk to her father. It seems unimaginable. They do not speak of these things. When she imagines trying, her tongue sticks in her mouth and cannot form the words.

There is another conversation, too, and it is almost a worse one. She cannot possibly have it, and she cannot put it off. Oh but today is a horrid day! She wants to sleep, but it turns round and round in her head and will not let her.

"Marius?"

Marius turns. He has not been sleeping. She sits up, gazing down at him. In the dark his face is a pale blur against the black of his hair and the white of the sheets. His eyes are dark and worried.

"I needed to know about my father," she says. "I could not go to you, because--"

 _Because terrible things have been happening,_ she cannot bring herself to say.

In the indistinct shadows, she reads in Marius's face everything she is not quite sure really happened: the mysterious vanishing furniture, the secrets kept from her, all the distractions to keep her from thinking of her father. It is terrible to look at Marius and think such things. She still does not know if they are only in her head.

Marius sits up, arranging the pillows against the headboard. She moves closer to him, and he takes her hand. She is shivering, and he is warm. He rubs her hand a little, and then he begins to tell her how afraid he was of Jean Valjean and how he had thought it his duty to protect her.

As if anyone on earth could need protecting from her father.

She watches the rounded edges of Marius's profile, his creased eyebrows, his worried eyes. It strikes her how young he still is--older than herself by five or six years, but what is six years? Marriage is not any less new to him.

Perhaps it should not comfort her so to realize they are both confused novices. But they were confused novices at other things, and they worked those out very well. 

Cosette squeezes his hand tight, for she is terrified. Her body is prickling and hot, and everything in it seems about to boil over. She wishes fainting happened as often in real life as it does in books, for fainting would save her from having to say it.

If he denies it, she will believe him. It is far more likely, after all, that there is some simple explanation for the furniture and all of it that has nothing to do with Marius. What does she know of the doings of grand houses and grand people? Perhaps nothing happened at all.

"Marius?" she asks. "Will you tell me what you did?"

At his soft indrawn breath, she knows he is not going to deny it.

He nods.

They shift to lie down with her back pressed against his chest and his arms wrapped tight about her waist. His breath is warm on the back of her neck as he talks.

He admits to the furniture. He tells her of trying to drive her father off, of how deliberately he distracted her, of how he knew all along where her father was. He tells her of all he did to keep her from knowing. She is sobbing into the pillow by the end.

And still, something feels healthier when he is done. Like some poison has been drawn out of her, like he sucked the venom from the snakebite.

"What do I do, Cosette?" he asks.

"Don't do it anymore."

"How can I ever make it up to--"

"Just don't do it anymore."

"But--"

She rolls over to face him. There is a bright gleam of wetness on his cheek and a dark flush around his eyes.

"How about this?" she says. "If you ever feel like hiding things and ... confusing me again, instead of doing it, just tell me about wanting to. Can you do that?"

Marius raises himself on his elbow to look down at her. There is just enough light to see his beautiful black eyes, solemn and earnest and swimming with tears.

"I can," he says. "I will. I swear it, Cosette."

\--

She takes the carriage early the next morning, alone. Alone, she ascends the stair and knocks.

Her father is sitting on the narrow bed in this nearly empty room, gazing at the floor. It makes her sick and shivery just setting foot here. Weeks ago, she and Marius came here and found him dying.

He looks up, and his face warms with the smile that belongs to Cosette alone. It is the kindest smile in all the world, but even with it, he looks sad. Cosette has always seen that, but she never thought about it. She had been so happy it seemed impossible for him to be anything else.

You are my papa, she thinks. You are Jean Valjean.

She walks forward. All she can feel is her heartbeat, and all she can see are his eyes. She sees the moment a spark of fear kindles in them. She cannot remember the last time she saw her papa afraid.

She stops before him and reaches out her hand. He frowns at it, pensive and hesitant.

It is as if she lived all her life in a country whose language she did not speak, and she has become fluent overnight. He thinks of himself as an old convict, and he does not believe he can be allowed to touch her hand. She keeps her hand where it is until he takes it.

"I know," she says.

Jean Valjean starts back, pulling away his hand as if the contact betrayed him. His face for a moment is not her papa's face but a stranger's, transformed by a terror that makes it terrifying.

When one is lost and afraid, one chooses kindness. Cosette knows this because her papa taught her so.

"Papa?" Her voice comes out soft and shaky, though she did not mean it to. "I know where you came from. I know who my mother was. I know all of it."

"No." Jean Valjean looks away from her, shaking his head over and over. His shoulders rock backwards and forwards, like people she has seen in the saddest of the houses they used to visit. "You should not. You cannot."

"Your name is Jean Valjean."

He jumps to his feet, staring around the little garret like he means to run. She sees in his face the prisoner who tried again and again to flee a place so terrible she cannot imagine it. Her own heart pounds like it is trying to break out of her chest. For an instant she thinks again she does not know the man before her with his broad shoulders and bronzed skin and big hands and frightened eyes.

But the reason she cannot imagine a place as terrible as the one he came from is because he sheltered her from it. All her life he kept her safe.

"And you are my papa," she says. "And I love you."

He stops trying to run and stands still. His eyes rest on her face, wary. She smiles, though tears are running down her cheeks.

"Come home?" she says. "Please?"

There are no miracles. At least, there is nothing that feels like one. Jean Valjean's eyes are dry and afraid. He does not smile.

He nods, though. Maybe that is enough.

Cosette takes his huge, callused hand in her small one, as much as she can hold of it. Gently, with tears streaming, she leads him from that place and takes him home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Come talk to me on tumblr! @everyonewasabird


	9. Which Concerns the Distance Between Picquigny and Faverolles

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! I'm very glad to be back to posting. :D
> 
> Content warning: contains Gillenormand. That's about it, really, though I think he's more than enough.

_July, 1833_

Cosette flings out a hand to grasp something. She finds only the bed beside her, empty but still warm.

She pushes her hair out of her face and frowns, uneasy despite the peaceful morning. It is not the empty bed that troubles her--that is nothing unusual. What had she reached for? She wants to believe it was Marius, but that fits ill with her half-remembered dream.

She was reaching for a broom.

She sits up abruptly, chilled all over. It has been years since she had such dreams.

She cannot regret making M. Combeferre tell her--she will not. But something has opened in her mind like a trap door into a cellar. It exhales a cold and musty breath, redolent of things long forgotten.

Her past had seemed like a story about someone else, easy never to think of. There are cobwebbed corners in her mind, and when she turns to look--

No, this will not do!

She swings her bare feet over the edge of the bed and pushes aside the bed curtains. The house is quiet, and all her family is within it, safe and at peace--she pushes away the thought that her father is not at peace. The light between the blinds is soft enough it must be barely dawn. Outside, she hears the rattle of the first carriages in the street and a bright trill of birdsong.

She wraps herself in her dressing gown and emerges into the house.

She stops in the doorway of the breakfast room, for Marius sits reading there. The dawn light glows on the premature lines of worry in his brow and the threads of gray among the black curls of his hair, new since the barricade. He always wakes first; she thinks he has never slept well. He has told her how he used to walk all night when he lived alone. She had asked him if he missed it, and he said he could not miss his life before her.

At the time, it had not struck her as sad.

Marius sees her, and his smile transforms his face. Cosette hurries to him, and he embraces her, solid and warm. The ghosts in her head bow out hastily, like guests embarrassed to have overstayed.

"You're awake early," he says.

She should take her own seat, but she would rather not. She kisses him, and when he fails to get the point, she kisses him again. Marius shifts his chair back from the table, and she settles in his lap.

It is lovely sitting in the sun that streams through the lace curtains. They steal kisses and let their hands slip between undone buttons and under dressing gowns, doing things they would not dare to were others awake. A dark flush creeps over the pallor of Marius's face and neck, and his eyes are wide and wild. He resembles not at all the demure young man who promenaded in the Luxembourg. He looks almost frightened by it, but Cosette can fear nothing when they are like this.

Far too soon, there is movement in the neighboring rooms. M. Gillenormand's querulous morning complaints drift out, and Marius goes still. Cosette gets up from his knee.

She would be delighted simply to withdraw to some less frequented room, but it does not work that way for him. Once one is interrupted by the old man's voice ... no, Cosette really cannot fault Marius for that.

She kisses him once on the forehead and goes to the kitchen to make sure the fire is kindled for breakfast.

\--

By breakfast, Marius is pale and silent again. Mademoiselle Gillenormand looks sour. Cosette's father comes out last, but she suspects he has been awake for hours, remaining in his chamber as long as he could.

He seems not to know what to do with himself in this grand house. Too often, he creeps like a shadow and will not ask the servants for things. Basque and Nicolette complain of being startled by him in odd places. Their complaints only make him keep more to his room.

It has only been a few weeks. Perhaps he will settle in with time. Cosette fears this idea is a little like placing a chunk of granite upon a sofa in hopes it will one day be a cushion.

M. Gillenormand presides over breakfast with delighted volubility, full of smiles and compliments for Marius and herself. He is talking at length about--but Cosette's attention has wandered. It is terribly rude of her. Her Uncle Fauchelevent used to ramble on just as long, telling meandering stories in his thick northern accent, and she always enjoyed listening to him.

As M. Gillenormand talks, her father gazes mildly at the table linen. Marius turns his coffee cup slowly in its saucer with a soft scraping sound and stares very hard at it. It is good that M. Gillenormand is so cheerful, but Cosette fears he bores her father and troubles Marius. She does not know how to get him to leave pauses for others to speak.

Their is a momentary lull, and she hurries to fill it, hoping to steer the conversation into something with room for other people. She talks of going to the market that afternoon and asks if anyone has special requests. She asks her father how he is settling in. When he gives only vague assurances, she talks of how she and Marius have plans to visit the Lesgles-Jolys for dinner, and by all accounts Musichetta is doing very well--

"If I wished to hear silly birds twitter," Mademoiselle Gillenormand says, "I would go into the garden."

Cosette freezes.

Everything has gone quiet. Her father is frowning.

"Aunt Gillenormand!" Marius cries, affronted.

He looks about to argue further, and Cosette cannot bear the quarrel that must ensue. Shall they debate aloud whether she is as empty-headed and silly as she fears she is? She grips Marius's arm and shakes her head, pleading. He reluctantly subsides. Mademoiselle Gillenormand sips her tea and keeps her eyes on her plate.

M. Gillenormand breaks the silence with a dry little laugh. "The old and dried up are jealous of the young and happy, my dear. My sainted daughter is a goose and a prude. Talk as much as you like! Anything said by a pretty girl is worth hearing."

It is kindly meant, but somehow it does not help at all. Cosette's cheeks burn, and her eyes sting. She wants to fling down her napkin and flee, but such pettishness can only make it worse.

When she says nothing, M. Gillenormand resumes his interrupted monologue with good cheer.

"Papa," she whispers. "Would you like to go into the garden after breakfast?"

Her father's smile is so kind she could cry.

\--

The Gillenormand house occupies the grand first floor of a five-story building which forms a full square around a large central courtyard. A portion of the courtyard is paved to allow the carriages entering through the porte cochère to turn around. In the rest, surrounded by the four walls of the house, Cosette keeps her garden.

It is a fine day. Her father gazes up mildly at the scores of windows overlooking them; Cosette draws his attention back to the flowers. It is not the garden of the Rue Plumet, but what other garden could be? Birds venture down into it, and the occasional bee or butterfly, and, somehow, enough light for her strawberries.

The air smells sweet, of green things and damp earth and the summer's day not yet warm. There is not room for many trees, but there are a few--the garden was here before she came, though it was poor and straggling then. Her flowers fill the beds and spill over the white sand paths. There is a sweet echo of birdsong and a hum of insects. The awful feeling in her chest loosens at last.

She asks her father again how he is settling in.

"I am glad to be here." He frowns away at the sun-dappled flowers and high walls. "But you have a respectable family now, and that is far better than having me."

Cosette hates this answer. It whispers to her of darker days when he pushed her away and made her call him Monsieur Jean. At the thought of that name, she shivers and pulls her shawl tight. She feels the breath from that cellar door, and she shakes off its chill with some pique.

"You never thought less of people who are not respectable! The families we used to visit? Papa, you cannot possibly!"

"No," he says, "I do not think them less. I only know the dangers they face. As a married woman in a good family, you are safe."

"Then you are safe too! I insist on it." She hurries on before he can disagree. "And I have not yet shown you the strawberry patch. Come! It is this way." She pulls him down the path to a sunnier place near a couple of gnarled old apple trees.

"The strawberries are mine to tend, and they have borne berries all spring--I have had to learn to make jam there were so many. You shall have some at breakfast tomorrow, and you must compliment me on how well I have done!"

The day feels colder than she knows the day to be. The bright sunlight feels dim. She is ignoring it. "We had terrible trouble with the snails this year, but I asked one of the market women and she told me to spread crushed eggshells, which have helped--but you probably know far more about all this, I must sound terribly silly! You shall have your own patch of garden to tend next year, anywhere you like--"

"Cosette?"

She breaks off, abashed. Already she is prattling on, after being remonstrated so recently. Her father sits on a stone bench, looking worried.

She sits beside him, trying to be quiet. She pulls up a grass flower, spins it a while between her fingers, then takes to plucking out the florets. When nothing remains, she lets it fall.

"I want you to be happy here, Papa."

"I am."

"Papa."

"You don't need to worry about me."

"Yes I do! If you won't!"

The light reflecting off the bright grass and strawberry leaves is soft and green, shining on her father's brown, weathered face. His light brown eyes are thoughtful and gentle.

Finally, he nods upwards, not at the sky but at the twisting black boughs of the apple trees. "Do these bear fruit?"

Cosette had asked M. Gillenormand the same question once. He had chuckled something about how years ago they grew little wrinkled things covered in pock marks that looked like--Cosette had politely refrained from hearing the rest of the sentence. The trees have not borne even those in some time.

"Not in many years," she says. "I believe it was small, hard fruit even then. In the house they think there is no hope."

"No hope," her father murmurs, gazing at the trees. "I wonder if that is really so."

\--

The afternoon sun streams warm through the open windows, ruffling the gauzy curtains and illuminating Cosette's needlework. It would be a delightful light to work by, but she is too amused to concentrate.

"It's an absolutely mad way to find a spouse," M. Courfeyrac says as he paces. "All you know by the end of the evening is whether she can waltz--an important consideration! But surely not the only one in marriage." 

"If it is, I'm horribly remiss." Marius sits smiling in the armchair nearest Cosette. "As I've never waltzed."

"And a married man! Unthinkable. Monsieur Fauchelevent, have you?"

Cosette's father shakes his head gravely as Cosette smiles into her work. It is only the four of them in the drawing room, and they seem to her a very pleasant company. It delights her to be mistress of a house where Marius's friends can visit.

"Pardieu," M. Courfeyrac says, flopping into a chair. "It's almost as if the antics of the privileged classes are pointless fripperies with no bearing on the real world! Somebody should inform them before it leads to difficulties."

"Monsieur Courfeyrac?" she asks. "I keep trying to invite Monsieur Combeferre to dinner, but he never replies. I fear--do you know if I have offended him?"

M. Courfeyrac sighs. "I promise, it isn't you. Whenever I knock he goes quiet and pretends not to be home. He's compensating for being lovely all June by being an ass all July."

"July," Marius says thoughtfully. "You really see him stopping by August?"

Marius has been trying to warm to M. Combeferre for Cosette's sake, with limited success.

"I foresee myself kicking his door down if he's still doing this in August. So one way or another, yes."

"What's he busy with these days?" Marius asks, perhaps trying again. "I know he's some sort of genius. I assumed he would stay in medicine, but if not that, what? Is he solving war? Famine? Poverty?"

M. Courfeyrac has been draped in the armchair with charming carelessness. Suddenly he is all brittle tension and discomfort.

"Enjolras," he says.

Cosette pricks her finger with the needle and inhales a quick, sharp breath. The name is a shock, and not a pleasant one.

"But--" Marius says. "Isn't Enjolras--dead?"

"Yes, probably. For the love of God, can we talk about something else?" M. Courfeyrac jumps up. "You've never waltzed you say? That won't do, I'll teach you."

"You just called it a pointless frippery!"

"Yes, but your wife would like it." He seems to realize the insult, for he turns crimson. "Madame, I by no means meant to imply--"

"Monsieur," Cosette says gently, "you know perfectly well I am as fond of pointless fripperies as you are."

He flashes her a grateful grin and advances on Marius.

"No!" Marius protests. "Just teach her!"

"That won't do, we all know she'll pick it up instantly. No, it is decidedly you who needs the instruction."

"Cosette, is it actually something you'd enjoy?"

In truth, it sounds delightful. "I am sure Monsieur Courfeyrac will not force the issue," she says, "if you really do not wish to."

"You know she means yes."

"Yes, Courfeyrac, you needn't translate my wife for me." Marius sighs, though he is smiling. He rises and steps into Courfeyrac's waiting arms. "Are you really going to--oh, very well. How do we--?"

Cosette goes to the piano, where she leafs through the music sheets for an appropriate waltz. She glances back to see M. Courfeyrac counting under his breath and guiding a nervous-looking Marius through the steps. She smiles and takes her seat.

"Papa? Will you turn the pages?"

Her father comes over. He cannot read music, so she always whispers to him when it is time to turn.

She begins, and the tinkling keys whisper through the drawing room. After a few turns about the room, Marius's shoulders relax, and he begins to smile. M. Courfeyrac is grinning. The loveliness of their faces puts her close to tears, though she could not say why.

She finishes, and M. Courfeyrac releases Marius with a gallant bow. Marius laughs and bows hastily back. M. Courfeyrac's troubled manner has grown natural again. She is glad.

"Monsieur?" she asks, smiling. "Now that you have taught my husband, will you teach me?"

He hesitates.

"I can play," Marius says. "Not as well, but I'm not bad. Go on."

"All right. Madame?"

M. Courfeyrac takes Cosette's hand with a nervous smile and settles his other so lightly at her waist she does not feel it. "Hand on my shoulder," he says.

His shoulder is warm with dancing, and sweat darkens the curls of his dark brown hair. Cosette is a little taller than he is. He glances up with a grin, and his eyes are astonishingly bright against the dark flush of his cheeks. He explains the steps as Marius begins to play.

He said Cosette would get it instantly--instead, she does nothing but tread on his feet, growing flustered and embarrassed. She likes music, but she has never had any practice dancing, for when could she have? Of course M. Courfeyrac had no way of knowing that, so of course he over-estimated her abilities, and now she is disappointing--

"It's all right," M. Courfeyrac whispers. "You're doing very well."

She nods. He begins again to count softly in her ear. It is not, she discovers, so different from finding the rhythm in her hands upon the piano keys. She relaxes into the motion. Marius's playing is soft and slow. Her father's smile is kind, and so is M. Courfeyrac's.

"Ah, a waltz!" M. Gillenormand cries from the doorway. Marius hits a loud false note and stops playing. M. Courfeyrac releases Cosette with a quick bow.

"The waltz was the masterpiece of the eighteenth century," M. Gillenormand says, smiling around at them. "How like my century it is to grasp an armful of a pretty girl and spin her till she clings dizzy to one's shoulder while old maids and the English feign shock! Down with those rows of stodgy English misses whose fingertips one barely touches before trading her down to the sweaty palms of the next man in line! We are lucky your prig of a century doesn't refuse to dance cheek to cheek with pretty partners altogether. Fie, my boy, you will not tell us when we have guests? We can understand little inconsiderations in the name of tripping about in the company of Madame's pretty little feet, but to leave us to our solitude while one of your foppish rascal friends whirls her about the room instead? Gracious me!"

Cosette flushes. She assumed Marius had told M. Gillenormand that M. Courfeyrac was here. She had never meant to exclude anyone.

"Monsieur Gillenormand, I am at your service," M. Courfeyrac says with a bow and a smile, "and I take no insult, I assure you. It would hardly be sporting to become offended by a man who has not updated his wardrobe since the Directory."

"I see you are in the same spirits as ever, Monsieur de Courfeyrac."

"Courfeyrac, or I shall take to calling you _de_ Gillenormand."

"I am perfectly aware of your surname, monsieur."

"Von Gillenormand!" M. Courfeyrac cries, laughing. "MacGillenormand!"

Cosette retreats to the sofa and takes up her needlework again. There is an oppressiveness in the air like the atmosphere before a storm, and she cannot see how to calm it.

"Young men of this century," M. Gillenormand says, "find their pleasures in abstemiousness and abnegation, heavens help them! They scrimp and save and troop after Beau Brummell in their grays and blacks, with pallid faces and no ornament but the banker's glittering watch chain. Pardieu! There are better birds to imitate for panache than the magpie! The men dress down, and the women dress up till we cannot see them through their corsets and petticoats. No wonder the young men of today are so timid, growing up among girls so concealed by bell-shaped skirts and pumpkin sleeves as to be anatomical mysteries!"

Cosette shifts uncomfortably within her wide gigot sleeves. This is a dreadful mistake, for it draws M. Gillenormand's eye to her.

"Now," he says, "my grandson married a fine girl, a beautiful girl! But what beauties we had in the days when a dress was airy gauze and little beside, and a cheeky breeze might reveal not a mere ankle but a perfect impression of--"

Marius starts up in his seat on the piano bench, terribly pale.

"Indeed, monsieur, you have me pegged exactly," M. Courfeyrac interposes smoothly. "I am regrettably colorless." His face is a warm, light brown, ruddy-cheeked and cheerful, and his coat is a deep blue over a gold-embroidered waistcoat and cream-colored trousers. If his cravat is not knotted with panache, no cravat ever has been. "But it is the fashion, and I am nothing if not a slave to it."

"But you, monsieur," M. Gillenormand says, looking him over, "I think you know better how to spend your time than most of today's prudish youths. I think you know quite as well as I did at your age. What stories I could tell Marius of what I got up to back then! I too was a red-blooded young fellow! I too had young friends with--pretty wives."

The implication is so dreadful it takes Cosette a moment to comprehend it. Her hands tremble, and she drops her needlework.

Marius leaps from the piano bench with his fists clenched. "You will not insult my wife, nor my friends!"

"No, no!" M. Gillenormand cries, quailing back. The change in him is shocking; every one of his ninety-two years is suddenly horribly visible: the thin hair lank and long over his ears, the papery pallor of his wrinkled face half lost in his towering cravat, his dentures made from other people's teeth. "I beg your pardon, Marius, I meant nothing by it!"

Marius stands a moment breathing hard, then he goes to the window and stares out through the curtains. There is a hard line in his cheek where his jaw is clenched.

The room is silent.

"Is it conceivable, monsieur," M. Courfeyrac says lightly, "you mistake for prudishness what in our century is called taste?"

He stares up at M. Gillenormand for a moment, light on his feet as a fencing master and with eyes blazing. Then he laughs and shakes his head.

"That is perhaps my cue to take my leave, anything else and--ah well, it really wouldn't do. Marius, madame, I'll see you tonight for Joly's whatsit, yes?"

"Yes, monsieur," Cosette murmurs. Marius manages a backward glance and a nod.

M. Courfeyrac bows to Cosette and her father and is gone.

In the silence that follows, M. Gillenormand comes over to Cosette to admire her needlework. He has never before shown an interest, but now he heaps on more praise than her distracted efforts deserve. Perhaps it is something like an apology; she cannot tell. Marius remains at the window.

"Cosette," her father says. "Would you like to go into the garden?"

She jumps up so quickly it is probably rude. "Yes, Papa. Marius, will you--?"

"No," Marius says without turning. "I'm going for a walk."

\--

As they step outside, Cosette's father picks up a ladder lying along the wall. The ladder is long and of solid oak, dreadfully heavy. Since his illness, Cosette has begun to think of him as an old man.

"You could ask Basque--"

He has already balanced it upon his shoulder. It does not even bow his back. He raises his eyebrows with a smile. "I would not make Basque carry this."

They proceed into the garden.

They reach the apple trees, and he leans the ladder against one and begins to climb. The ladder is rickety and swaying and horribly high. He reaches the top and looks about in the branches. At least he cannot go farther.

He reaches above him to a branch. Before Cosette can scream, he has heaved himself off the ladder and hangs by his hands.

An instant later, he has pulled himself up to sit comfortably among the boughs. He touches an old, worn branch and smiles. After a moment, he raises himself to another part of the tree and examines it too with kindly interest.

Cosette folds her hands and composes herself with an effort. If she looks afraid, he might come down, and she understands just enough to think that would be a terrible pity.

Her father spends the next hour inspecting the trees. He descends at last, smiling.

"They are not so broken down as you fear. I can prune a little now, if I'm careful. I shall have to leave the harder pruning till winter."

It is the first time Cosette has heard him talk of the future, or of staying, or of living that long. She bows her face in the shadow of her bonnet so he will not see the tears.

"Where did you learn to care for apple trees?" she asks softly. "The convent?"

"No." He pauses. "I learned as a boy. I was a tree pruner when I was young."

Cosette's lips part. She cannot seem to make a sound.

"In Brie," Jean Valjean adds. "In a village called Faverolles."

She feels as if a robin has alighted on her shoulder. She fears any sudden movement could startle it away. The idea of gardening on this sunny day while her father tells her of Faverolles is the finest afternoon she can imagine.

"If--" she breathes. "If I go inside and put on my gardening dress and come back very, very quickly, will you still tell me this story, Papa?"

"Yes."

"You promise?"

"Yes, Cosette."

She picks up her skirts and runs.

\--

Cosette kneels in a patch of garden, weeding among the rows of flowers. Her father is back in the trees, clipping carefully with his shears. A steady trickle of small branches rains down.

"We were poor," he says. His voice drifts from the branches. "Very poor. My sister had seven children."

"Sister!" Cosette cries. "I have an aunt, then! And--cousins?"

"No," he says after a pause. "Not anymore. I lost track of them over some years."

"Will you tell me about them?"

There is a long silence. At last, the snip of the shears resumes, and so does Jean Valjean.

He tells Cosette of seven nieces and nephews, of how they were poor and hungry, but also of how they used to hide in the neighbor's cornfield as he was returning home in order to leap out upon him, yelling and laughing. He tells her of games they played around him, though he was too tired to join; of the time a neighbor's pig got loose in the garden; of how the eldest girl, also called Jeanne, made dolls for the others from knotted fabric scraps.

Cosette knows how all these stories end. They do not speak of that--not the Bagne, not what searches he must have made for them, not Cosette's mother, not Javert, not the barricades.

But he can talk of Faverolles.

"We could go someday," she says. "You could show me."

Jean Valjean has come down to sit on the stone bench behind her, drinking from the water jug they brought out. They are wearing broad-brimmed straw hats Cosette found in the market the other day. One is plain, and one is sewn with little blue flowers; Jean Valjean wears the blue-flowered one serenely. She has been swapping hats with him since she was very small.

"That man I was," he says. "He was so young. He never thought so, but he was."

"Would it make you sad to see it?"

"I think I fear more I should feel nothing."

Cosette pulls a few more weeds, wrestling with a thought. She has long learned not to ask questions, but this seems like something she should have known long ago.

"Papa?" she asks. "Uncle Fauchelevent was not really your brother, was he?"

There is a long silence. When she turns, Jean Valjean has leaned his elbows on his knees. His head is bowed, and the wide brim of his hat hides his face.

"No," he says finally. "Fauchelevent was good to take me in. He lied to the mother superior for me. We called each other brothers. And Faverolles is in Picardy, not really so far from Picquigny--I suppose that has nothing to do with it. I don't know why I brought it up."

He sighs and shakes his head. His bowed shoulders fall. 

Cosette should never have asked. There is a terrible, panicky feeling in her chest.

"I'm sorry," she says. "Papa, I'm sorry."

"It's all right," says Jean Valjean quietly. "What can it matter now?"

\--

Marius is quiet when Cosette returns to the house to wash up, and he remains quiet in the carriage. When she asks if anything is the matter, he only shakes his head.

The tense, unsettled feeling inside her has only grown worse. She has been worried for her father, but now that they are going to see Marius's friends, she remembers to worry about other things.

M. Gillenormand doubtless meant nothing by that horrible remark. Yet it feels as if he scattered the seeds of some poisonous weed among her flowerbeds. Will they take root? Marius is jealous by nature. Such fears as M. Gillenormand raised were never far out of his way.

They have lost so many people they loved--must she fear losing M. Courfeyrac to this, or others? It all feels so fragile.

They arrive, and Musichetta and Messieurs Joly and Lesgles greet them warmly. M. Courfeyrac throws an arm around Marius with a cry of welcome.

A cloud crosses Marius's face. Cosette freezes.

But Marius lets himself be drawn into conversation. If there is a storm brewing, it has not broken yet. M. Courfeyrac seems not to have noticed the tension--or perhaps he is only harder to read than Marius.

Musichetta grins and takes Cosette by the arm. "I'm lending you books tonight," she says. "No arguments."

It is right, perhaps, to leave them to sort it out themselves. Much as it frightens her, Cosette lets herself be pulled away.

\--

Cosette kneels on the floor of the master bedroom, surrounded by stacks of books. The bed behind her is of remarkable width, though the room is small. She is politely attempting not to draw conclusions from it.

Musichetta has arranged a couch of cushions on the floor to recline on, pointing Cosette to any book she cannot reach herself. Her belly is more pronounced now. Cosette had worried about her being on the floor, but Musichetta waved away her concerns saying the floor was fine, the only trouble was ever getting up from it.

The conversation down the hall is muffled by distance. Someone, M. Lesgles perhaps, is laughing--does that mean there is no trouble? Cosette cannot tell.

"Marius--" she says.

"Oh, he disapproves?" Musichetta's grin is not in the least contrite. "Try that one."

Cosette opens the book distractedly. Her eye falls upon the page, and she snaps it shut, blushing.

"Not--not of books, I think. But this afternoon, he and Monsieur Courfeyrac--I fear some falling out has happened. Or shall happen."

"Well, yes, one does want to kick Jean-Francois sometimes. It comes with the territory, I wouldn't worry about it." Musichetta tosses her another book. "He charms his way into fights, and he charms his way back out of them. Believe me, he met my mother once--not that my mother isn't also charming. But the letter that said when she was arriving in Paris had gone astray, so we didn't--is that one too much?"

"I--" Cosette says. "No. But--"

"But?"

"Marius is stubborn."

"Stubborn! And what is Courfeyrac? This one probably really is too much--no, I'm lending it to you anyway, don't look at it till you get home. The image of it burning a hole in whatever drawer you hide it in amuses me."

Cosette still cannot hear much from the sitting room. Musichetta begins detailing plots--here a highwayman, there a dragoon, there a castle with shocking secrets, there yet another convent. Cosette tries her best to attend.

From down the hall, she hears Marius laugh.

Marius does not feign such things. If he is laughing, things are all right. Cosette shuts her eyes, fighting perfectly foolish tears. When she looks up, Musichetta's heavy brows are knitted.

"You never said it was that bad."

"I was being silly," Cosette says. "Never mind it. What were you saying?"

Musichetta sits up with an effort, still regarding Cosette with that frown. "Your husband may be a fool, I don't know him. But Jean-Francois isn't. You and I spent the same months last year wondering if those men would live. They should all be dead, and they know it. We married against custom, we built lives where life was impossible--I warn you, we're all stuck with each other now. There are families of blood, and there are families of--" Musichetta smiles suddenly. _"Blood._ Do you really think any of us would just leave?"

Cosette stares at her, aware of an ache in her throat and a wide-open grief she had not known was there. Tears are starting, and she is fast losing ground against them. All at once she is sobbing into her hands.

"Oof," Musichetta murmurs, leaning forward. "Here. Come here." She tugs Cosette's arm, pulling her nearer. Cosette obeys, and Musichetta sits back with another grunt, arranging the two of them so she can pat Cosette's head as Cosette weeps. It is a kind gesture, if an odd one. 

"Apparently you do," Musichetta says. "Well. Remind me to pick a fight some time with whoever taught you that."

\--

It has been a lovely evening.

A bag of books sits beside the door for Cosette to take away with her. The top book is a cookbook for appearance's sake, and everything below it is not a cookbook. Cosette has been blushing with terror and delight every time she thinks of it.

It is after dinner now, and they have retired to the sitting room. Musichetta and Messieurs Joly and Lesgles have fallen into a discussion nearby. Cosette sits curled against Marius with M. Courfeyrac on her other side. Her eyes are shut; she can no longer keep them open. She smiles every time she feels Marius laugh, though she has long since lost the thread of conversation.

For so long, she has felt a panicked animal inside her chest, thrashing and clawing and afraid; tonight, in this lovely company, it grew quiet. She feels it curled up peacefully now, a soft, warm weight against her breastbone.

Musichetta was right, she thinks. It is not so easily broken as she feared.

She must fall asleep, for she wakes to Marius and M. Courfeyrac talking softly. Marius's arms are around her, and her head is against his chest. She sees no reason to disturb them by stirring.

"Can it really be that bad?" Marius asks. "To put it off a few years?"

"I recognize it's terribly unromantic of me," M. Courfeyrac says, "but I want it over with."

"No, that's--please don't. You can want a wedding over with, of course, the family speeches and dinners and relatives making terrible comments about--you can certainly want all that over. But you can't marry just to quiet your family."

"Watch me," M. Courfeyrac says, sighing.

"No," Marius says.

M. Courfeyrac makes a soft sound, like a laugh. "If one of us was going to end up happy, I'm glad it's you. I'm not sure I saw it coming."

"Well, no."

"But happiness isn't an expectation one can have. Certainly not after--" The sofa cushions move as M. Courfeyrac shrugs. "I'm glad you are. I'm glad you have such a--" He stops. "--You're awake, aren't you."

Cosette opens her eyes guiltily.

M. Courfeyrac reclines against the cushions, looking not much more awake than she is. His smile is soft and unguarded. She thinks talking to Marius is good for him; she knows it is good for Marius.

"I apologize for eavesdropping, monsieur."

"I'm the one who should be apologizing, I'm the terrible bore who put you to sleep."

That is not at all what happened, and Cosette is sleepy and flustered and feels terrible that he should take it wrongly. She apologizes, trying to explain she meant no offense by it, on the contrary--

"I know," M. Courfeyrac says, and his eyes grow still softer. "I'm teasing you. I promise, I know." He looks sweet and kind and a little sad, the way all Marius's friends are sad.

"But it's late," Marius says, kissing her forehead and her sleep-rumpled curls. "Our hosts went to bed an hour ago."

She looks up to see him smiling gently. She knows Marius's face far better than than she knows M. Courfeyrac's. She knows how rarely he looks like this. 

"Your conversation seemed so nice," she says. "I don't want it to have to end."

"We'll have plenty of other chances," says Marius, smiling

"I'm very glad," she says.

\--

"You're quiet today," her father says.

Cosette has been sitting on the stone bench, staring over the sunny strawberry patch. She was too lost in thought to hear him approach.

She wants to explain to him the thing she felt last night: the safety and peace of a house that was not this one. She wants to tell him he is worth a thousand M. Gillenormands. But he would only look uncomfortable and not believe her.

She does not know how to tell him that one can acquire a respectable family in all the proper ways, and that does not make it better than the other kind.

She stares at the trimmed grass under her feet and thinks of the thick, soft grass of the convent garden. She thinks of how she used to lie in the very farthest corner of the yard, gazing up past the gray walls and her father's red roses at the wide, blue sky. She would listen as her papa and her Uncle Fauchelevent talked.

Uncle Fauchelevent was garrulous and funny, telling long stories as they worked. Her father would smile fondly as he listened. Sometimes he would stop his work and lean on his shovel to listen better.

He spoke sometimes, too. His voice was soft and his words few, but his face was happy. There are so few people he ever talked to for the sake of talking. And when he spoke--

Cosette looks up suddenly. "You had his accent."

"Accent?"

"You never had much of one, normally. But when you talked to Uncle Fauchelevent, you had his." She smiles, oddly shy. "Perhaps because Picquigny is not so far from Faverolles."

Jean Valjean sits down beside her. "I never knew that."

A robin has ventured down to the sun-dappled path. She watches it peck at the ground and then fly off.

"When I said--" she says, "that Uncle Fauchelevent was not your brother--" She swallows, fighting back tears. "Papa, I never meant to take away your brother."

"Cosette! You took nothing from me."

"But," she says, "if you liked--I would go on thinking of him that way. As your brother."

Jean Valjean gazes at her. Then he bows his head and shuts his eyes. The light through his straw hat dusts his face with sunny little stars.

He smiles suddenly at some memory she cannot see.

"Yes," he says. "I would like that very much."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I spent a while this time hashing out what No. 6 Rue des Filles-du-Calvaire actually should look like--thanks especially to @vapaus-ystavyys-tasaarvo, @midautumnnightdream, @fremedon, and @sinceremercy for help with that!
> 
> It turns out (despite Hugo's claim to the contrary) that the building that was present at that address in canon era is still there (and still at the same address), and can be seen on satellite maps and street view!
> 
> You can find the floorplan on this searchable high-res canon-era atlas: http://archives.paris.fr/f/planspacellaires/tableau/?&crit1=9&reset_facette=1&v_9_1=Paris+dans+ses+limites+avant+1860
> 
> And this is a good overview of how houses worked in Paris, because _oh my god_ I had no idea what "house" meant in a Parisian context before reading this: https://victorianparis.wordpress.com/2013/04/18/living-vertically-parisian-housing-in-1850-part-1/
> 
> I've ultimately fudged the details some on the Gillenormand house layout--as far as I can tell, there's no way the actual building had the kind of garden space Hugo describes. But I think the place should be much more solid in the narrative than it was. Many, many thanks for everybody's help on that!
> 
> I can be found at @everyonewasabird on tumblr--come talk to me!


	10. Conversations In a Dark Garden, Part One

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: racism, racist police, no actual violence but ... acab. Discussion of slavery. Brief swearing.
> 
> Note on character descriptions: A couple of character descriptions in this chapter are different from what I had previously written, most notably Joly and Courfeyrac. I've been reading Gautier's _History of Romanticism_ with its descriptions of Hugo's actual friend group, and it struck me that there's just no historical reason to imagine as many of the Amis as white as I'd been doing. I'm really excited to just, like... stop doing that.
> 
> Anyway, I've changed a few headcanons accordingly. In terms of retroactive changes to this text, I rewrote some descriptions of Courfeyrac and Joly in chapter 2 and and Courfeyrac in chapter 9, but otherwise not too much seemed to need altering.
> 
> Secondary note: I'm trying to be thoughtful about how I'm handling race in this, but I'm white and I know I can miss things. Nobody is ever obligated to point out my mistakes to me, but if you do I will absolutely do my best to listen.

_August, 1833_

The instant Combeferre steps through the barred glass door, his body clenches with a fear that veers dangerously towards irritability. He is in a place where he can ill afford to give vent to that. The room is close and hot, and maybe that is why it feels stifling.

He tries, as a rule, to stay out of police stations.

He asks for Javert. The sergeant on duty tells him Javert is no longer in the government's employ.

This detail is so interesting Combeferre almost forgets how much he hates this dreary little room and everyone in it. A puzzle box is opening before him.

"Why?" he asks.

The sergeant looks up from his paperwork for the first time. His eyes narrow, sizing up Combeferre in a way that became familiar long ago. Combeferre feels his face heating and his back going tense. He tries to pretend this might still go well.

"Would you tell me how I might contact him?"

"Javert," the man says. A slight smile curls his lip. He has something Combeferre wants, and he knows it. "What would you want with Javert now, I wonder?"

Another sergeant across the room leans back in his seat, eyeing Combeferre. It does not bode well.

Combeferre smiles blandly and lies. "I am a physician. I was in Montreuil-sur-Mer some days ago, where Javert was formerly posted. A mutual acquaintance, a patient of mine, asked me to deliver a message to him. As I was returning to Paris, I agreed. Unfortunately, I was caught in a rain storm just outside Amiens, and the page on which she had written the address became illegible. I can write to her for it, of course, but I already regret the elapsed time. Your assistance would certainly expedite the process."

 _"A mutual acquaintance."_ The sergeant imitates Combeferre's polished accent with a sneer. "Pyot," he calls to the other sergeant, "you think that old guard dog had acquaintances?"

Pyot snorts.

"And do you see this fellow being a doctor?"

 _"Although,"_ Combeferre interrupts, "I fear Madame Victurnien is too far away to confirm our acquaintance, I can certainly provide my credentials as a physician. I attended--"

"A message, is it?" the sergeant says, sitting forward. His smile has returned. "So you're an errand boy. That's to say--a spy. Came in to confess, did you?"

The other one, Pyot, returns his feet to the ground. His hand just brushes the hilt of his saber. Both men are grinning. The heat of the room is unbearable. There is no use arguing their logic, for it is not real logic. The sergeant is a cat showing off its claws to a mouse.

"Only to having acquaintances who send letters," Combeferre says tartly. "Though that seems something of a novelty here."

"Fuck off," says the sergeant.

"Gladly. Just as soon as you furnish me with Javert's address."

It is not wise, perhaps; he is angry. He says it as if refusal to be intimidated is a victory, as if he wins if they lose their tempers first. He has long stopped expecting any more fruitful outcome.

The sergeant turns red and rises, and so does the level of threat. There is a squeal of a chair thrust back and a whisper of sliding metal: Pyot stands with saber drawn, no longer smiling. Combeferre leaves.

\--

He is not followed.

He checks and rechecks the street behind him and doubles down side streets, walking fast. Even when he is a long way away, he keeps glancing back. He hates that they can still make him afraid.

He has gone a mile when he steps into the shadowy gap between two buildings and leans against a wall, mopping his brow with his handkerchief. He is hot, out of breath, and humiliated. He strikes the bricks and mutters a curse.

How he longs for his friends.

The thought pierces his unguarded chest, vivid and knife-sharp. One cannot explain in polite society why a police station should be dangerous to an innocent man, but his friends knew. How many times was Bahorel detained for a bright waistcoat and dark skin when the police claimed some threat to public order? Joly, the least offensive person imaginable, has not been immune to such treatment, and neither has Courfeyrac. Lesgles, though fair enough to sunburn in December, has a knack for being overheard saying the wrong thing; Feuilly was suspicious because he was poor. Prouvaire was in danger for the company he kept and how publicly he kept it-- _such is tolerance,_ he had said the day they met. Combeferre has been that company more than once.

And Enjolras. How many hours has Combeferre spent signaling back and forth with him across some crowd, apprising each other of threats? Enjolras embodied certain ideals of European beauty to the point of absurdity, and it conferred a fickle blessing. It lent impressiveness to every word he uttered, up until some trick of the light or carelessness of dress betrayed him--and woe betide him then! How many nights has Combeferre sat up waiting, sick with fear? Sometimes, very late, he still catches himself listening for a familiar step in the hall and a key in the door.

For so many years, they kept each other safe.

Were Enjolras here, he would fold his arms and lean against this wall at Combeferre's side, splendid and furious, muttering under his breath so only Combeferre could hear: Of a world where the purpose of law will not be to protect the powerful from the powerless. Where petty little men will not sow fear at the behest of the state. Where _equality under the law_ will not sound like the punchline to a joke.

Combeferre sags against the brickwork. He needs desperately to hear Enjolras say it, for he can no longer picture that world. He does not know how to believe it is still coming.

 _Long live the future,_ he thinks. He makes a sound he cannot classify as either a sob or a laugh.

In a few minutes he begins the long walk home.

\--

Combeferre's room is so hot and close the air feels viscous. He paces, stripped to his shirt and trousers, and still the linen sticks to his back. He shut the window to block the smell from the slaughterhouse across the street. It was too reminiscent of medical school dissection rooms.

So Javert, who spent his life climbing the ranks of law enforcement, is no longer employed by the police. Did he resign? Was he dismissed? Perhaps it means nothing. Perhaps it is unrelated to last June. Perhaps Javert had nothing to do with Enjolras's fate.

Combeferre does not believe it. The world is not that kind.

Is not the most likely explanation of Enjolras's disappearance that the authorities took him? Of course it is. What then? The brutal whims of soldiers, perhaps. The secret prison. The unmarked grave.

Combeferre should not picture it, but he does. The heat grows dizzying, and he throws open the window and leans out, breathing through his mouth. A breeze cools his brow a little. He sinks down to sit on the floor beneath the window, leaning his head against the wall.

Was the second man in the safe house Javert?

No pain or threat could make Enjolras give the police that location--once, Combeferre would have staked the world on that. But Enjolras had fought nonstop for two days with no food, water, or sleep, watching his friends die. He was not a god. He was only the finest man Combeferre ever knew, and men break. There is no blame in that thought--good God, Combeferre has not been that self-righteous in some time. It only frightens him unbearably.

He gets up and resumes pacing.

How is it every survivor of the Rue de la Chanvrerie was not arrested? Men from the Saint-Merry barricade languish in prison, and Combeferre and his friends did not conceal their identities. Javert would have gone straight to his superiors and named them all.

The influence of Courfeyrac's family name could not have withstood Javert's evidence, and neither could the unsubstantiated claims of the surgeon who saved Combeferre. As far as Combeferre can tell, Joly, Lesgles, and Pontmercy were never investigated. Even Enjolras's name hardly appeared in the papers, as if it was in doubt.

And why was Javert not at Courfeyrac's trial? It is true Combeferre was hidden in the far back corner, half-mad with terror for Courfeyrac--he was not at his most observant. But it is impossible Javert spoke that day. Combeferre could not be in a room with that voice and not know.

Javert may not be dead, but his impact on their lives has been the same as if he were.

Was he softhearted? Incompetent? Corrupt? Combeferre saw him at the barricade, heard that cold, gruff voice--he cannot believe Javert was softhearted. As to competence, certainly he was the worst spy Combeferre has ever heard of. But if his record of promotions is to be believed, he was skilled in police work. And as to corruption--well. He was skilled in police work. That is answer enough.

There is one person who could tell Combeferre of Javert.

Combeferre dislikes the idea. Talking of Javert disturbs him after only two days' acquaintance--what would it do to an old man Javert persecuted thirty years? Madame Pontmercy had still feared for her father some weeks ago. Combeferre has no idea how the old man fares.

His desire for answers wars with his conscience, and finally, he sends a note to Courfeyrac. The reply arrives an hour later:

>   
>  C--
> 
> Valjean! Valjean, you ask me! Why won't you answer your door?
> 
> No, I don't know how Valjean is! Nobody knows how Valjean is, Valjean is impossible to read. You could come fail to read him for yourself if you'd stop ignoring Cosette's dinner invitations, she keeps asking me about it.
> 
> Stop ignoring me too, damn you.
> 
> Affectionately,
> 
> \--C  
> 

It is true Combeferre has let a number of social connections lapse of late. Courfeyrac has called every day this week, knocking and remonstrating through the door a quarter of an hour before he leaves. Combeferre never means to put him off precisely, though he also never responds. Perhaps it is that neither Javert nor Enjolras are topics Courfeyrac wants to hear about. Or perhaps Combeferre is simply in a solitary mood.

It is also true the Pontmercys have been sending him dinner invitations, which he has been hiding under books the better to ignore them. He is not certain where he stands with Pontmercy, and as to Madame Pontmercy, he keeps reviewing all the explanations he gave her and finding them clumsy and unsuitable. He dislikes thinking of it. What possible instinct of perversity or obligation leads them to desire more of his presence?

He is likewise overdue for tea with his mother. Perhaps he will go next week--or better yet, the week after. The corner of the cafe where he gives literacy instruction has been almost the only place he sets foot besides his room.

Joly caught him there the other day and attempted to invite him over. Combeferre did not actually back away from him in the street, as that would have been undignified. He stood stiffly and gazed past Joly, answering in monosyllables. He was sorry, but not sorry enough not to do it.

Joly had merely smiled. "We'd love to see you regardless, Combeferre. If not this Friday, any Friday. Just show up, all right? Seven in the evening or so." Joly had waved cheerily and walked away. Combeferre had raised a hand in brief farewell and fled back to his books.

It is a plausible, if unflattering, supposition that Combeferre behaves this way more often than he thinks, and Joly was not offended because he was quite used to it.

Combeferre looks again at Courfeyrac's note. Dinner parties consist of being half-strangled by one's collar while making stilted and uninteresting conversation. He does not see why the Pontmercys insist on having them. There is probably no acceptable way to confirm in advance whether Valjean will be there. There is certainly no polite way to confirm that Pontmercy's grandfather will not be.

But the best way to determine whether Valjean is equal to discussing Javert is to see him. Perhaps Combeferre has been avoiding people long enough.

He swallows an unaccountable nervousness and looks under the book that conceals his various invitations. There is one for the following evening.

He should probably be glad.

\--

As Combeferre passes the porter, he suspects this is a mistake. As he climbs the stairs and knocks on Pontmercy's front door, he is certain.

Then Madame Pontmercy is framed in the doorway, and her face lights up with improbable joy.

"Monsieur Combeferre! You came!" She takes his arm and pulls him inside, calling out, "Marius, Monsieur Courfeyrac, he _did_ come! Oh, I'm sorry, Monsieur," she adds, flushing as she notices how she is dragging him. "Forgive me, it is only, we have not seen you in some time, and--I feared you would not come back." She smiles shyly.

Combeferre had expected stiffness, a servant at the door, and stilted small talk. This affectionate informality reminds him so acutely of friends in happier days he does not manage to speak. He presses her hand.

And then Courfeyrac is upon him--literally, for Courfeyrac has never stood on ceremony when he can fling his arms around people. He is talking, laughing, probably teasing. Combeferre holds him tight and does not hear a word.

When he lets go, Pontmercy is there too, greeting him with an actual smile, which Combeferre returns. Even Pontmercy's grandfather has a head cold tonight and is confined to his room; it contradicts Combeferre's training as a physician to be pleased by that.

He follows them inside, pleasantly surprised.

The company sits down to dine. Mademoiselle Gillenormand is present, and so is Jean Valjean. Pontmercy introduces the latter as Ultime Fauchelevent. 

Valjean-Fauchelevent resembles far more the hale old man of the barricade than the frail one of a few months ago. His broad, lined face has color in it, and his eyes, though gentle and sad, are keen. It is impossible to sit facing him and not think of it: nineteen years in the bagne, the rise and disgrace of Mayor Madeleine, how he carried Combeferre's dying friends and Combeferre himself through a haze of smoke and bullets. Combeferre listens to the talk of the table, sips his wine, and fights down thoughts of war.

Asking Valjean about Javert does not seem so far-fetched now. Valjean looks, frankly, more equal to the conversation than Combeferre is.

Madame Pontmercy and Courfeyrac guide the conversation with effervescent cheer. Valjean sits quietly beside his daughter, and his smile when he looks at her is blinding. Madame Pontmercy's glances at him are no less fond. Pontmercy laughs more than Combeferre knew Pontmercy could laugh. Only Mademoiselle Gillenormand seems ill at ease, but perhaps she always is.

Does Valjean know his daughter knows? Combeferre sits up sharply. He has not considered the question. Is this dinner the happy aftermath of that talk, or is this calm the prelude to yet more pain? He should not have avoided everyone so long. He should have had the compassion to wonder.

"Combeferre." Pontmercy has turned to him. They have both been quiet for some time. "Courfeyrac says you're looking for Enjolras?"

Courfeyrac chokes and stops talking.

Pontmercy looks earnestly curious. Pontmercy's notions of dinner party conversation are perhaps not much like other people's.

"I thought him dead," Pontmercy adds.

The table is silent. If there is a way to pivot the conversation gracefully to some less fraught subject, the trick is beyond Combeferre's skill. The people he thinks of as good at social niceties--Courfeyrac, Madame Pontmercy--are not speaking.

"I don't know," Combeferre says. "If he is, I can't confirm it. I also cannot find him." He makes an uncertain gesture and hopes somebody changes the subject.

"My father has recently taken up the cause of the apple trees in the garden," Madame Pontmercy says brightly. "It has been some years since they bore fruit, but we think--"

"That's odd, though," Pontmercy says. "Isn't it?"

"How about we discuss it later?" Combeferre says, pointedly. He hopes, perhaps vainly, that Pontmercy will take the hint and not bring it up later, either.

Later, when they are all settled in the drawing room, the Pontmercys and Courfeyrac fall into cheerful conversation. Combeferre is happy for them, though he sits apart from it. There is a faint ache in his heart every time Courfeyrac laughs at something Pontmercy says, but perhaps all happiness hurts a little these days.

"Monsieur," he says quietly to Jean Valjean. "Might I have a word?"

\--

Jean Valjean leads him down several passages, and they descend a narrow servant's stairway into the house's far less ornate ground floor. Valjean unlocks a little room that resembles something between an office and a broom cupboard.

Combeferre has learned over the years to discern a variety of social insults. Being relegated to tradesman's entrances and downstairs rooms is one of them. He stops on the threshold.

Valjean lights a candle and sits, gesturing to the chair opposite. "Monsieur, have a--"

He sees Combeferre's face and rises instantly. "Monsieur, I beg your pardon, humbly. I intended no offense. It is only, the house is not mine, and I do not like to take up--but regardless." He hesitates. "Would you perhaps prefer the garden?"

"Greatly," Combeferre says.

\--

The darkening sky glows pale above the high walls of the house. Much of the courtyard is taken up by the garden, a shadowy mass of trees and flowers in the dusk. Dozens upon dozens of windows overlook them, some glowing yellow with candlelight, others black.

There is something institutional and confining about these walls and windows that reminds Combeferre of prison courtyards. He suspects the likeness has not escaped Jean Valjean.

Valjean shuts the door softly behind them. He is shorter than Combeferre, but his humble coat cannot hide the breadth and power of his shoulders. In the uncertain light his eyes are bright amber among the darker creases of his face. His white hair is a hazy halo. The rest of him blends with the shadow. He regards Combeferre in silence.

There is a power in him like a physical force, uncanny and unsettling. Combeferre remembers the feeling of meeting Enjolras, whose will seemed an inexorable, forward-speeding thing. Jean Valjean seems instead to radiate an immense stillness, as if Combeferre is standing at the foot of a mountain.

"You know I told her?" Combeferre blurts out, though it is not what he came to say.

Jean Valjean lowers his eyes. "I have watched the shadow of my secrets clear from my daughter's face. I did not know. I should have. You saw her suffering when I could not see it."

It is not the answer Combeferre feared, but it troubles him. Something is not right.

"I wish to know," Valjean says quietly, "what you intend to do with me."

"To do with you?"

"I am known for what I am--that is well. My conscience has long been troubled by concealment. But whatever I may deserve, Madame Pontmercy must not become known as the daughter of--" He sees Combeferre's expression and stops. "Again I've offended you."

"In thinking me a spy for the police? A little."

"I did not mean that. My point was I cannot ask innocent men to conceal the identity of an old _bagnard."_

"Innocent men," Combeferre repeats. "What innocent men do you know?"

The old man's glance is keener than he likes.

"On the contrary," Combeferre says hurriedly, "we could all be arrested for treason tomorrow. You ask us to conceal minor crimes committed from necessity. I cannot conceive what hardship you think it brings us. As to my intentions--I intend to treat you as the father of a friend of mine, as someone whose conduct on the barricade I admire, and as a man who, I strongly suspect, once saved my life."

Valjean looks away. "Did I? I don't recall. I suppose I may have moved you from one spot to another. It seems hardly worth mentioning."

Combeferre files away the knowledge that reminders of his good deeds make Valjean uneasy.

"Is it so little to you?" he asks mildly. "To find a dying man, frightened, unable to breathe, and to lay him where he will be calm? On a battlefield the finest surgeon could do no more. It is my medical opinion that you saved my life. Had I died, you would have given me great comfort in death. I owe much to you."

"So you conceal me out of gratitude."

"Out of justice, monsieur."

"You care about justice." Valjean's broad shoulders shift and settle. His head is bowed, and his hands are clasped before him, yet he radiates energy for all his stillness.

"None of you," he says, "understand what I am. This is not about-- _bread._ I suppose you consider my history unjust. But consider--the unjustly killed are no less dead. One may decry their deaths, but one does not, even in the name of justice, invite them to supper. I am what the bagne made me. No good act I perform nor mask I wear erases that mark. My daughter does not understand what she clings to. She speaks of family, as if I could belong to anyone's family."

Combeferre stares at Valjean's calm face and feels something that seemed immovable tumble away into an abyss. If Jean Valjean is a mountain, it is one balanced over a void of empty space.

He remembers suddenly a beloved voice crying, _"I have judged myself also, and you will soon see to what I have condemned myself."_ Combeferre had looked around at his friends' resolute faces and called out to Enjolras, joining their fates to his. The crime that stained the barricade stained everyone. They would not let Enjolras bear its expiation alone. To die on the barricade was to die for the world.

Instead, Combeferre survived and folded up that broken promise with the rest of his hypocrisies.

But these men of inexorable moral purpose, as Enjolras was and Jean Valjean surely is--what happens when they sentence themselves and the world does not oblige? Combeferre lies awake all night sometimes, wondering that.

His heart is pounding. He thinks of Madame Pontmercy greeting him with such joy at the door tonight, as if she had feared that he-- _he,_ Combeferre, a cold and uncongenial man she can barely call a friend--would not come back.

Good God, it is not Combeferre she fears the loss of.

"Monsieur," Combeferre says, in a quiet voice that only falters a little, "will you step into the garden with me?"

The green spaces of the yard are shadowy. The sandy paths glow white. Valjean follows meekly. In the gold rectangle cast by a window, Combeferre sights a bench beneath the trees and makes his way to it. The marble is still warm from the day. Valjean sits beside him.

"Monsieur," Combeferre says. "Monsieur--"

Enjolras always called Combeferre eloquent; he did not mean when Combeferre spoke of this. Enjolras is the only person who ever heard him speak of this.

"Monsieur," Combeferre says, "I saw the prison hulks once."

Valjean sits quietly. Combeferre goes on.

"I was a very young man, traveling through Toulon with friends. The ships rotting in the harbor were a tourist attraction, the way they make monstrous theater of the guillotine. I could do nothing when I saw them, could think nothing--it shocked me, that hell we made on earth. I looked on the forced labor and the chains. I felt--"

He does not feel it now. One can pore over evil memories so many times the rough edges smooth over, the way oysters roll parasite worms into pearls. He does not feel it, yet he hears his own voice grow odd and uneven. He watches his hands shake.

"In my family, monsieur--there were slaves in my family. My paternal grandmother was one. My grandfather--well, it is the old story. Myself, I was born in France, moneyed and privileged. Free. Those horrors across the ocean were only an idea to me when I was young.

"In Toulon, I saw the men coming back at sundown in their chains, and it was a thunderclap in my head. My father was born in such chains. That I was not ... was an accident, more or less. That my grandfather freed my father and no one else he owned cannot be called 'mercy.'"

Combeferre is silent a moment, watching a breeze ruffle the dark leaves of the garden.

"It is not the same, of course. People are sent to the bagne for crimes. Women and children are not sent. It is shorter: some term of years, or no more than one lifetime--it does not consume one's children in any direct sense. It is not on the basis of race, or they like to say it is not. There are rules concerning the treatment of prisoners, in theory.

"And still, Monsieur--it is the same.

"The friends I traveled with were men I had known since boyhood. They mocked the convicts, and they were not alone among the onlookers. They were young. Frightened, I suppose, by what they saw. I never spoke to them again.

"By convention, we refer to these horrors as justice. They are not. You speak as if punishing a man for having once been punished were a sensible proposition, as if wrongs committed against you are wrongs you have committed, as if undergoing horrors made you a horror. You talk as if your history stains you--would you say so of everyone who has lived in ignominy? I think not. I said this to your daughter and I say it to you, monsieur: Chains are not the fault of the chained."

Valjean sits motionless.

Combeferre's hands jerk clumsily as he flexes them. There is no use pretending he is not breathing hard. At least he can claim to have astonished a man impossible to astonish--he manages not to laugh from sheer nerves, but it is a near miss.

"Thank you, monsieur," Jean Valjean says softly. "I know a little of what such kindness costs. It will comfort me to know Cosette has such friends."

"And I changed nothing."

The bright candlelight from one tall window falls across Valjean's white hair and gentle eyes and his soft, sad smile. The bright squares of the windowpanes are divided by black lines, and these fall across Valjean too.

"I cannot see what you could have changed."

"You know very well why I told that story."

"Yes," Valjean says, looking away. "It was kind." He gazes up at the lit windows. "She will be wondering after us. Was there something else you wanted to discuss?"

"No. Go in to your daughter."

A crease appears between Valjean's eyes. "Monsieur, are you--"

"I will be in in a minute."

Jean Valjean rises. Combeferre watches him make his way over the dark ground towards a side door. He is quick and light as a cat, though his left leg drags a little.

When the door shuts, Combeferre slumps forward. He feels wrung out, with the clammy skin and racing heart that follow a too-copious bloodletting. These are physiological facts, disconnected from any emotion he can name. No vein was lanced, no blood shed, and still he is breathing far more heavily than seems warranted by a quiet garden and a peaceful night.

\--

He wants Courfeyrac. That is what finally compels him inside.

He blinks in the doorway of the drawing room, pained by the brightness. He dislikes how raw his expression must look.

Courfeyrac is talking to the Pontmercys. He is laughing, animated, and a little too loud; Combeferre has missed a few rounds of drinks. The Pontmercys are also laughing. Mademoiselle Gillenormand sits across the room, sewing in silence. Valjean must have gone to bed.

In the days of the Friends of the A B C, Combeferre would have gone and collapsed against Courfeyrac, laying his head on Courfeyrac's shoulder while the voices of his friends flowed around him. He would not have minded them seeing him thus; on the contrary, that vulnerability would have seemed an act of defiance, against the world, against his own worst tendencies. He would have let their beloved voices wash over him until they washed this feeling away.

Tonight, he pours himself a glass of brandy and stands by the wall.

It is not Courfeyrac who comes over, though Combeferre had been hoping. Nor is it Madame Pontmercy, whose presence keeps being pleasanter than he expects.

It is Pontmercy. Combeferre takes a large swallow of brandy and raises his eyebrows. Pontmercy's face clouds a little, but he is undeterred.

"You said we could discuss Enjolras."

It is not as if Combeferre minds the subject; he was already thinking of it. He glances at Courfeyrac, still talking to Madame Pontmercy. It is also not as if standing by this wall has been particularly fulfilling. He drains his glass, refills it, and nods at the door.

Pontmercy leads him into a grand library. As Pontmercy lights the lamps, Combeferre glances over the shelves of gleaming volumes, which look largely untouched. It is an impressive room rather than a well-loved one, and even so, he feels a profound animal comfort in a room full of books. He settles into an armchair and breathes the calm of yellowed paper and dusty leather. Already it is doing more for his nerves than the brandy. Pontmercy takes the other chair.

"I have been searching for him," Combeferre says. "There are lists of dead that include everyone else I expected to be there. But not Enjolras."

Pontmercy sips his drink and stares into the shadows. "It seems like another lifetime. Him. All of--that." He traces an arc in the air with his glass, perhaps indicating revolutionary apocalypse. "I want him to be all right, but I try to imagine him a ... civilian, like we've become, and I can't. Maybe that's only me, I know you knew him better. Who would he be, if he were here? Does he come have drinks with us, like this?"

Combeferre thinks back to quieter days, to late nights in the Musain, or at home, or in the rooms of their friends after some meeting or some riot. He used to imagine himself a little apart from the group's gaiety; he realizes now that he never was, not the way Pontmercy was. He imagines never having had those nights and feels an intolerable loss.

"He would," he says softly. "He has. I think--if he returned, you would see it this time."

"Him and Grandfather. I can't say I'm eager to introduce them."

Combeferre lets himself imagine the catastrophe that would ensue: the young man and the old one locked in revolutionary and ultra-royalist ire. He smiles faintly. "They would come to blows in your drawing room."

"Grandfather would enjoy that. I'm sure Enjolras has better things to do."

Combeferre shuts his eyes and sips his drink.

"I wanted to say--" Pontmercy says. "I'd like to help, if I can. Where are you in the research?"

"Nowhere," Combeferre admits. "I have nothing. I turn the same facts around and around."

"Tell me."

Combeferre examines Pontmercy's face, pensive and earnest the candlelight. He means it; Pontmercy is nothing if not agonizingly sincere.

So Combeferre tells him.

"Javert," Pontmercy says thoughtfully. "I knew him somewhat. We'd met, anyway. Have you asked at the station?"

"They wouldn't tell me."

"They might tell me."

Combeferre sits up. Pontmercy is right: His reception at the station might be different.

"No suspicion fell on you, correct? And you're a baron."

"And I owe Javert pistols."

"You--what?"

"The pistols I came to the barricade with. They were Javert's, he lent them to me. Of course I don't still have them, but I could offer to reimburse him."

"Why do you have Javert's pistols?"

"I don't _still_ \--it's complicated. There was a robbery. I heard it planned, so I went to the station and told Javert about it. We needed a signal, and he gave me his pistols."

"Just because you--" Combeferre takes a very long swallow of his drink, staring at Pontmercy. "Looked trustworthy."

"I think so. He was an odd man, rough, rude--avuncular in an odd way. I can't say I liked him, but I'm glad there's a chance he survived. He struck me as a fair man."

"I don't doubt he did."

Combeferre fails to keep the ice out of his voice. There is a brittle silence.

Pontmercy slams his drink on the table beside him. "I don't understand how I offended you this time!"

This is no doubt true. Police to Pontmercy are rough-but-well-meaning fellows who help out when bad men plan robberies. Police treat Pontmercy like a favored nephew and give him pistols the way one hands sweets to children. Combeferre drums his fingers on the arm of the chair, then he rises and paces.

He had been starting to enjoy the new reality where he and Pontmercy do more than glare at each other. He glances at Pontmercy's mutinous expression, sighs, and takes another long swallow of his drink.

"A man like Javert never forgets whom the police force serves," he says. "His world is divided into sheep and wolves--the respectable people he protects and the _misérables_ he protects them from. He would recognize you as a gentleman and therefore within the fold. Men like him are fawning dogs to you and wolves to ... people who are not you."

"You know this for a fact?"

Combeferre does not reply.

"Enjolras, though--"

"Was a revolutionary demagogue who sentenced Javert to die." 

Enjolras was also other things. There is no reason to tell Pontmercy about the other things.

"Oh," says Pontmercy.

"Never trust Javert or his people. Give no one any name but your own. Say nothing of the barricade. If you can find Javert--"

Combeferre stops, staring past the lamp on the table at the shadowy bookshelves. He imagines the answers Javert might have--about the brutal whims of soldiers, most likely, the secret prison, and the unmarked grave. But perhaps he holds other answers entirely: That Enjolras is alive. Enjolras's whereabouts.

Combeferre's breath catches, and the lamplight blurs in his vision. He does not trust his voice and so does not speak.

"I'll find him," Pontmercy says softly.

Combeferre can only nod.

He retakes his seat. Their talk meanders into the fits and starts and awkward pauses that typify conversations with Pontmercy. Combeferre is grateful. The other conversations of the evening cut too deep, and this one sticks to the surface with comforting dullness. It may be he is growing drunk, and it is certain he is exhausted.

As Pontmercy tells him something about trying to start a law practice, Combeferre hears voices in the hall. A nasal voice, male, requests an audience with the Baron Pontmercy.

It seems a strange hour to call, but in truth, Combeferre has lost any sense of what time it is. The use of the title irritates him more than it perhaps should.

"Were you expecting company?"

Pontmercy shakes his head.

A servant enters with a letter and hands it to Pontmercy. Pontmercy looks down and goes rigid. The blood drains from his face. His eyes are fixed.

With a closer friend, Combeferre would ask immediately. As it is, he hesitates and says, "Is there trouble?"

"No," Pontmercy says after a moment. "It's not--no. No trouble."

"Then I will leave you to your visitor."

Pontmercy nods, still staring at the letter. "Basque," he says, "please send him in."

Combeferre reaches the door just as the visitor does.

The man is stooped-shouldered and thin, and he seems to shrink smaller within a threadbare coat twice his size. Despite Combeferre's greater height, the little man contrives to gaze down his nose at him through green spectacles. His gray hair is combed flat. His eyes are cold as stones.

Combeferre nods stiffly. The man ignores him and addresses Pontmercy with an exaggerated bow.

"Monsieur le Baron, I have information of exceptional importance that concerns your ears alone. It is not intended to be--" He glances darkly at Combeferre. "--Eavesdropped upon. Monsieur, it seems to me impossible that I should not have already had the honor of seeing Monsieur le Baron in society--"

Pontmercy rouses himself from his abstraction to stare at the stranger. "No, I don't think so. Combeferre, please go enjoy the rest of the party, and tell my wife I'll be there soon. You can leave the door open--this gentleman cannot have very much to say to me."

"Monsieur le Baron, on the contrary! What I have to impart is of the greatest--"

Whatever veiled conflict they are enacting, Combeferre is just as happy not listening to it. He nods and departs.

As he goes he hears Pontmercy say, "The Baron de Thénard, is it? What do you want?"

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah, sorry, it's him. I realized at a certain point that I feel like I don't get to call this fix-it fic unless I also fix what results from that last scene with Thénardier. Unfortunately, that means he's in this story now. :P
> 
> The timing is definitely off for when Thénardier is visiting--this is August, and in the brick it was June. I'm going to plead the butterfly effect here, if I may: let's just say some one of the many things that changed in this continuity also disrupted Thénardier's timeline.
> 
> Come talk to me on tumblr! @everyonewasabird


	11. Conversations In a Dark Garden, Part Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: trauma, triggering, past child abuse.

_August, 1833_

The lamps and candles blur in the glow of the evening's wine, and Cosette is not terribly sorry. They have reached the hour of the night when conversation grows merry and very little happens. The flames flicker and dance in the night breeze that wafts through the window, which carries the scent of flowers and a faint, sweet presentiment of apples.

M. Courfeyrac has been telling her the most delightful stories.

He has something of the manner of a cooking pot bubbling over, talking fast and laughing loudly beyond his usual liveliness. Perhaps it is the wine; Cosette cannot tell. She has been laughing until her sides ache.

They are alone in the drawing room aside from Mademoiselle Gillenormand, who sews on the opposite sofa and ignores them. It is wrong of Cosette, perhaps, not to try to speak to her. But she is happy, and matters of diplomacy can wait.

In the other room, Marius and M. Combeferre are talking. Earlier tonight, M. Combeferre had a long conversation with her father. Cosette has the breathless, anticipatory feeling one gets in transplanting flowers into a new bed, hoping they will take root. There can be no finer thing than for all the people she is fond of to be fond of one another. Yet one cannot force people any more than one forces flowers.

"What the devil is keeping them?" M. Courfeyrac says.

Cosette looks at him, perplexed. He seems more restless than she realized, almost disturbed.

"Are you not glad they're finally talking?"

"That thoroughly depends on what they talk about."

"Why, Monsieur? What do you fear?"

M. Courfeyrac jerks suddenly, as if startled or in pain. After a pause, he stretches his arm as if pretending some twinge in it is what troubles him. She is sure it is not.

"Nothing, there's nothing to fear--damn them! Sorry," he adds, as Mademoiselle Gillenormand tsks over her needlework. "I'm afraid I'm terrible company tonight. Have I told you about Mademoiselle Lebordais's efforts to keep pet goats? As if the world hadn't had enough of Marie Antoinette already--"

"Monsieur, what's wrong?"

"With goats?"

"No, Monsieur."

For a moment she thinks he might answer, but he only says, "Well never mind it then. As to the goats--"

Cosette does not press him.

\--

M. Combeferre returns alone. Cosette cannot fathom what is keeping Marius.

He hesitates in the doorway, looking befuddled by tiredness and alcohol and too much conversation. She has noticed before how company exhausts him. He gazes at her and M. Courfeyrac with bleary longing.

He is tipsier than she is, she thinks. She smiles, and he smiles back.

"Sit with us, Monsieur. We shan't make you talk."

Everything about him has softened a little, including the click of his footsteps as he comes over. He collapses on M. Courfeyrac's other side and leans his head back with a sigh.

"So," M. Courfeyrac says conversationally, "is Marius suitably delighted to help you dig up graves so we can all look at Enjolras's corpse?"

Cosette goes still.

The hardness in his voice bewilders her. She wants to smooth this over, whatever it is, but they are closer friends to each other than either is to her--her efforts would be absurd and probably unwelcome. She cannot tell what to do.

M. Combeferre slowly raises his head.

"Is that what you fear?" he asks softly. "The proof?"

M. Courfeyrac's laugh sounds metallic. "No. I fear he'll turn out to have been a god after all, and when the light touches whatever grisly thing you dig up, his skin will grow back. He'll rise again, and there he'll be, grand and glowing and terrible as ever."

A chill creeps down Cosette's arms and blossoms in her stomach. M. Courfeyrac laughs and tosses back the remains of his brandy.

M. Combeferre sits up, looking considerably more awake. He examines M. Courfeyrac with the grave expression of the doctor he once was.

"Courfeyrac, do you really believe--"

"Stop looking like that. No, of course I don't mean literally. Damn this evening! I can't talk to you right now."

"I thought," M. Combeferre says cautiously, "you wanted me to engage more with Pontmercy."

"Did you."

"Yes."

"Yes, of course you did." M. Courfeyrac drops his head into his hands. "I can't--I don't want another fight like February, I'm being an irrational idiot, anybody can see I'm in the wrong, I _know._ But I can't--"

"Would it be better," M. Combeferre says, "if I let you be?"

"You're not offended?"

"No."

"That's good of you."

"Hardly. Do you think I don't know how many dark moods of mine you've dealt with?"

M. Courfeyrac laughs weakly. He offers M. Combeferre his hand. M. Combeferre lifts it to his lips and kisses the knuckles with an expression so serious and gentle Cosette averts her eyes to keep from intruding.

"Nothing is broken," he says quietly. "We'll talk again soon."

She feels the sofa move as M. Courfeyrac nods.

M. Combeferre gets up and crosses to Mademoiselle Gillenormand's corner. Cosette winces--he will not get a warmer reception there. He makes some faltering efforts to speak. After some moments of silent sewing, Mademoiselle Gillenormand replies. To Cosette's astonishment, they fall into conversation. It is more than Cosette has heard Mademoiselle Gillenormand talk to anyone besides Mademoiselle Vaubois from church.

They seem to be discussing books.

Cosette turns back to M. Courfeyrac, whose shoulders are hunched so tight it is painful to look at him. He attempts to smile; his smile is horrible.

He has not looked this bad since last winter. Cosette had no power then to fix whatever these black moods were, and she fears she has none now.

"I can fetch Marius," she whispers.

He gives up smiling and shuts his eyes. "Please," he says.

\--

There are voices speaking as Cosette makes her way down the darkened corridor. Marius's voice is sharp and angry, though he keeps it low. She frowns, walking softly. She cannot think to whom he would speak thus--M. Gillenormand is surely asleep, and she cannot imagine him addressing the servants in this tone. She prays it is not her father, who excused himself earlier saying he had some work to do in the basement.

She reaches the open door of the library.

A man stands with his back to her. She does not know him--yet her heart hammers against the clasp of the cape at her throat. She had been about to greet them. She cannot speak.

The man turns a little, smiling, and Cosette sees his face. In an instant she is a child again, powerless and frightened, and he is the wolf grinning in all the shadows. He smiled like this as he composed his notes of debt to her mother. He smiled like this as he whispered orders to his wife, who pinched Cosette when she was bad and beat her with hands big and hard as paving stones. For an instant, the only name Cosette can remember for him is Monsieur.

But he has a name like other mortals. He is Thénardier.

Perhaps Thénardier can sense her fear, for his eyes rove towards the doorway. Faster than thought Cosette slips backwards on legs that seem stiff as sticks though they also tremble like jelly. Her petticoats do not rustle, for she is silent by instinct. She melts into the shadows, invisible to eyes looking from the brighter light of the library.

The wolf sniffs the air a moment. Then he turns back to Marius.

"You saved the life of a colonel--” Marius says.

"Of a general."

"Of a colonel!"

Marius is angry, but not angry enough. He is not afraid enough. Thénardier shifts his weight as if in embarrassment, but he is not embarrassed. Nothing embarrasses him.

"There you are, Madame," says a deep and kindly voice from down the hall. "I apologize, I'd been asked to inform you your husband had a--"

Cosette makes a wild motion with her hand.

M. Combeferre falls silent. She sees him arrange himself quietly near the wall at the other end of the corridor, watching.

Thénardier says Jean Valjean's name, and Cosette trembles with a very different terror.

"You can't denounce him without denouncing yourself," Marius says. "This tale of meeting him in the sewers--you can hardly tell that to the police!"

"I humbly beg your pardon, Monsieur le Baron. I don't mean to contradict, but the sewers need never enter into it. I don't have to prove your father-in-law committed a crime that night. I don't even have to prove he's Jean Valjean. All I need's a witness who can identify the former Mayor Madeleine, and the rest falls into place like a guillotine blade.

"And, begging your pardon further, Monsieur le Baron, there's no difficulty there. There's a town full of honest citizens still angry at being duped. I've become acquainted over correspondence with a good woman itching to come down to Paris to see justice done. If it's not the good Madame Victurnien who names him, any of a hundred others will do."

"He can be pardoned," Marius growls. "And you can be kicked."

"All very true I'm sure, Monsieur le Baron. That's your prerogative."

Thénardier waits. Marius does not kick him.

Instead, he tells Thénardier he will settle the debt of honor for his father's life and his father-in-law's freedom. He says he expects never to see Thénardier again.

He hands him a handful of banknotes.

Cosette cannot speak. Some caustic feeling fills her from the soles of her feet to the back of her throat and chokes her.

A slow grin spreads over Thénardier's face--thoughtful, speculative. Cosette has seen that grin before.

He turns and starts towards her, smiling like a wolf with its fangs in something's neck. Before she is aware of any decision to move, she has flattened herself into the shadows along the wall.

Thénardier exits the library, shuts the door, and turns away down the corridor. He counts his money and puts it in his pocket.

He is sated. He will go and not return. She is safe. Her father is safe. She grips the folds of her skirt with shaking hands and tells herself that is enough.

But there is an image in her mind of a thin, dirty child, with matted hair and chapped hands. The child is a girl, small for her age, huddled in shadows. Cosette does not see herself in that image now--she is a woman grown, comfortable and beloved and safe. She sees instead her own child, the daughter she and Marius might, God willing, one day have. And if it is not her child--it will be someone else’s child.

Thénardier's grin tonight means someone will suffer. Someone always does.

It will not be Cosette this time, and it will not be her family. It will be someone less protected. Thénardier will not treat that person any better than he treated the child Cosette. That person will not deserve it any more than Cosette did, or than her mother did.

Cosette would like very much to faint. She would like to be responsible for nothing. She listens to Thénardier's receding footsteps and twists her hands in her dress. She would like not to know.

 _"Oh, my mother,"_ she whispers into the shadows.

Then she is pushing away from the wall and tottering after him. He is a long way down the corridor. She is as slow as if in a dream.

M. Combeferre still stands at the end of the hall, ahead of Thénardier. Cosette lifts her hand to draw his eye. She cannot speak, but she mouths, _Stop him._

M. Combeferre smiles blandly and steps forward, placing himself between Thénardier and the exit. He makes some commonplace remark Cosette does not hear.

Thénardier tries to sidestep him. M. Combeferre makes a polite observation about the weather and moves back into his way.

Cosette walks on, fixing her gaze on Thénardier's narrow back and gray hair until his image burns her eyes and seems to glow about the edges. The corridor seems endless, yet she approaches faster than she wants to.

She reaches him and stops. She closes her eyes in prayer, and then she smiles.

"Monsieur Thénardier!" she cries. "How lovely to see you!"

He turns.

Her smile feels like a mask, but it does not matter. She is a well-mannered lady in a nice dress, and he has always been intimidated by such people. It is part of why he hates them.

"I do not know if you'll remember me, Monsieur, but I remember you. I was sorry to hear about your sad loss."

"Well," Thénardier says, looking away with a nervous grin. "We have hopes of rectifying it. There will be grander things than that little inn in our future, you can trust to that."

"I meant your wife and daughter, Monsieur."

"Oh, them, yes. A terrible tragedy. And my wife's constitution--like an ox she was! The strength of ten grenadiers."

"I remember it," Cosette says quietly.

And she embraces Thénardier.

At the smell of his sweat, something screams inside her like a snared rabbit. His stubble scrapes her cheek like the fangs of a snake, and his lank hair on her neck is the skitter of a spider. She feels so far from herself her body is like a dreamed body, but she reaches--

She reaches into his coat pocket and takes back the money.

Quick as a child snatching food from a table, she slips her hand through the gap in the folds of her gown and petticoat and into the pocket tied about her waist.

She releases Thénardier, still smiling. The dim corridor glitters and darkens in her vision. The atmosphere of the house is stifling. Thénardier speaks; she does not hear him. She replies; she hardly knows what she says. There is a kind of furnace roar in her head that drowns out sound.

"Well," M. Combeferre says loudly. "It was illuminating to make your acquaintance, Monsieur. Now I'm sure you have somewhere else to be."

He steps aside, and Thénardier flees. Thénardier's rapid footsteps fade away down the corridor.

The instant front door clicks shut behind him, Cosette gasps for air--she had not known she was holding her breath. She sags against the wall, panting.

M. Combeferre moves towards her, but she recoils with such wild terror he steps back.

"Madame."

Cosette shakes her head. Her entire body has begun to tremble. She seems to feel the wad of banknotes through her under-petticoats, burning like a hot coal.

"I am--" Her voice is breathy, and there is a high, strained note in it. "I am fine, Monsieur. You should--you should return to the party."

"I will fetch your husband. Or your father."

"No!" she cries. "I am--I'm fine. Do not--don't. I couldn't--" She presses her hand hard over her mouth, for odd, breathy laughter is starting to come. "I need only--I think--I will go to my room. I need only to go to my room, Monsieur."

She must look dreadful, for his face is terribly concerned.

"A glass of wine, madame."

"Nothing, monsieur. I need only--" She tries to move away and trips. He catches her arm to steady her, though he is careful not to step too near. His presence has stopped frightening her, at least. She grips his arm, solid beneath his sleeve.

"If you will have nothing else," he says quietly, "wait with me a moment to catch your breath."

Cosette nods and leans back against the wall, shutting her eyes.

"Breathe, Madame--with me. Inhale. Exhale. Good."

She follows his slow breathing. Gradually the shuddering, iron-banded tension in her body eases. It is nice, for a moment, to have someone to tell her what to do.

"Better?" he asks.

She opens her eyes. The corridor is dim, only intermittently lit by lamps and the glow from a few open doorways. M. Combeferre's normally sharp gaze is bleary and unfocused. Looking at his face, it is remarkable he managed to help her so adroitly. He looks as if he would far rather be asleep.

"Thank you, Monsieur. I would be grateful if you said nothing of this."

He does not look pleased. "What happened, Madame?"

"Nothing happened."

"Nothing? It has been some time since I've been a party to intrigue, but I am not quite that much of a fool. You said some name--who was that man?"

He knew the name Thénardier well enough a month ago to explain Cosette's history to her; he cannot have forgotten. But drunk and desperately tired as he is, he seems to have comprehended nothing. Cosette is glad.

"Please enjoy the party, Monsieur. I will be there shortly. There are some matters I must attend to."

She holds his gaze until he reluctantly lets her go.

\--

It was only a dream. It did not happen.

Cosette sits on the stone bench in the garden, staring up at the rows of glowing windows. She is aware of pain in her fingertips, dampness against her knees, sweat soaking the chemise beneath her corset. These things seem so far away they might be occurring in someone else's body. The inside of her head is empty and quiet.

None of it is real. Thénardier cannot find her here.

Yet she remembers upending her jewelry box into her linen drawer. She had slammed the drawer shut and dashed out, terrified Marius would come into the bedroom looking for her. She remembers kneeling in the earth in her fine gown, scrabbling with her bare hands in the dirt beneath her strawberry plants, burying a box full of money.

Did that happen? It cannot have happened.

She looks down. Dirt cakes the beds of her fingernails and is impacted under them. Her nails have broken with digging, like she dug her way out of the earth. Her father gave her a fine metal jewelry box, years ago. It is a casket now. She shudders.

She looks back at the rows of glowing windows.

Thénardier will have noticed the loss. He will know. He will come for Cosette and the people she loves, and he will never stop coming. He will make her pay. She should never have done it. It was a terrible wicked act, and a theft, and a sin. She pictures his smile again and cannot think how she could have done differently.

There are footsteps.

Cosette starts up, panicked, like a wild animal in a trap. But each sharp footfall is followed by a soft and slightly dragging one. She grows calm.

This is the step she used to hear as a child playing in the convent garden, though there is no bell now. It is the step she heard when she used to dig for woodlice in the wooded verdure of the Rue Plumet, when her papa came out smiling to read or talk or teach her the names of the flowers. It is the step she has been hearing all the finest weeks of this summer as she bent contentedly over her strawberries and her father tended his apple trees.

As a child, she had feared every footstep but that one. It was by the whisper of her papa's dragging left foot that she knew not to be afraid.

She breaths out a shuddering gasp. The air that fills her mouth is sweet with the scent of apples.

"Papa," she whispers.

Jean Valjean sits down. His face is dark under the night sky, but his hair glows bright.

He regards Cosette thoughtfully a moment, then he fishes his handkerchief from his pocket and dries her face. She had not known she was weeping.

"Hush now," he says, very soft. "It's all right."

It is not all right. But she nods anyway.

He picks up her hand and begins wiping the dirt away. She lays her head on his shoulder and lets him clean her fingers one by one.

As he works, he talks to her of the garden they sit in, and then of the garden in the Rue Plumet, and the garden in the convent. Then he talks of the house before all the gardens, where she played with Catherine and he taught her to read.

"And I would teach Catherine to read," she says.

"You would teach Catherine," he agrees.

"Do you remember?" she says, "I would tuck her in beside me when I went to bed. I would tell her I loved her and that she need not sweep the floor tomorrow either, and that we would play again. I told her I would be there to comfort her when she woke from bad dreams."

"Yes," Jean Valjean says. "You told her every night."

"Was it tiresome," she asks, "to play the same games over and over?"

He finishes cleaning her hand and lays it down.

"I could have played them a thousand years," he says.

Cosette's head still rests on his shoulder. She stares over the dark strawberry patch whose black leaves shiver in the breeze. The lights in the windows have been winking out one by one. Her guests will have gone by now. She hopes M. Courfeyrac is all right.

"I will never let harm come to you," Jean Valjean says.

Cosette shuts her eyes and wishes she were young enough to believe him.

\--

It is as Cosette sits at her dressing table preparing for bed that she realizes she cannot tell Marius.

She freezes with the brush halfway down her hair. Such a thing is impossible. She cannot keep such a secret, not from him.

But Marius is stubborn. His debt, with his father's memory at stake--Cosette could never explain well enough to change his mind. She would try, and he would hear her out--he would even forgive her. When she had finished, he would find Thénardier and return the money. Nothing Cosette could say would stop him.

Is she not wrong, then? If Marius wills this, is it not the right thing?

There is nothing for it, she must go and dig up the box, take it to Marius, and confess her sins. He will apologize to Thénardier for her folly, and all will be made right. The wolf, once fed, will go away. Cosette's family will be safe.

She stares across the room to where Marius sits on the edge of their bed. After a moment, she returns to brushing her hair.

"I'm sorry I was away so long during the party," Marius says. "A troubling visitor called, but I believe I settled the matter for--"

He stops. He looks up, and his eyes are very black against his pale cheeks and bloodless brow.

"No. I promised I wouldn't do it again. Cosette, my love--it was Thénardier."

She adores him for saying it even as she wishes he had lied.

"Oh," she says.

Marius rises and comes over. He strokes her hair back from her cheek, gazing down at her with a loving, troubled face. She once believed her love for him made her transparent. She stares up, wide-eyed and trembling, fearing and hoping he will read everything in her heart through her eyes.

Marius kisses her softly on the forehead.

"It's all right," he says. "He won't come back, my love. I've made sure this time. We're safe."

\--

Cosette wakes late in the morning, as tired as if she had not slept. Cup after cup of sweetened black coffee does nothing to clear her head. She sits in the breakfast room alone, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

Marius is out. She retains a hazy memory of half-waking to his early-morning explanation of some errand he had to run for M. Combeferre. She had fallen back asleep before he had his stockings on.

She is glad for the solitude. In the clarity of daylight, she has a great deal of thinking to do. She hopes her father will rise soon, for he has dealt with Thénardier before. He will know better than she what must be done.

The sunlight slants across the dark wood of the grandfather clock in the corner. Cosette frowns. It is late in the morning and her father has not risen. It is unlike him.

She asks Nicolette, who is passing. Nicolette says she has not seen him today.

Cosette returns to her coffee, but Nicolette pauses at the door. "Madame, you know of the letter that arrived?"

"Letter!" Cosette exclaims. "What letter?"

Nicolette brings it.

It has already been opened. Cosette would ask by whom, but she cannot speak. 

Her fingers tremble as she unfolds the cheap, yellowed paper, which smells of tobacco.

> Madame La Barronne Pontmercy (Cosette):
> 
> One can permitt a fine lady her games--what of it? we who are downtrodden and indigent do not begruge the weathy their little freaks. Following the sorowful bereevement of our poor wife and daughter, what slings and arows can still wound? Doutless Madame La Barronne needed the money, and doutless she needed her husband not to know--we bear no grudge.
> 
> We have been forced by iniquity to understand pawnshops well enough. We will be the moneylender for Madame.
> 
> As Madame may not understand these things, having heretofour no cause to, we hasten to explain.
> 
> The money she took is a loan. When she pays it back, it will be with interest--let us say fifty percent. That is two thousand two hundred and fifty francs in total. We will collect the money next Friday at her convenience.
> 
> It is customary in these little exchanges to pawn some small object to serve as the plege. We would not be so crass.
> 
> Rather:
> 
> Not knowing what matters Madame La Barone sets store by, we will promise her two things will occur if the above sum is not in our hands by Friday next.
> 
> Madame La Barronne's noble husband will be informed of the theft of his money.
> 
> Madame La Barrone's convict father, one Jean Valjean, alias Ultime Fauchelevent, alias Urbain Fabre, alias Madeleine lately of Montreuil-sur-Mer, will be identified to the police.
> 
> I await Madame La Barronne's efficency in the expedition of the matter.
> 
> your very humble
> 
> and very obedient servant,
> 
> ... But why need I sign it? You know who you robbed.

Cosette sits a long time staring at the letter. Her head swims. The blood has drained from her face. Her hands are very cold.

"Nicolette!" she cries suddenly. "Was it my husband who opened this?"

Nicolette reenters the breakfast room. "No, Madame, it arrived after he left. I don't know who could have opened it. Monsieur Gillenormand is still feeling poorly and breakfasted in his room. I'm sure he has not come into the hall. I can't imagine who else--"

Cosette flings down her napkin and runs from the breakfast room. Her father's bedchamber is at the back of the house, in the smallest room that could serve that purpose.

She pounds on his door. No one answers. She tries the handle. It is unlocked.

The bed is made. The room is tidied. The armoire stands empty. 

There are no candlesticks on the mantelpiece. There is no trunk at the foot of the bed.

Jean Valjean has gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I realized at some point that Marius giving Thenardier that money might be the worst thing that happens in the brick, and I don't think I get to call this fix-it fic unless I also fix that.
> 
> So, uh. Sorry. ;__;
> 
> This thing has a happy ending, I _promise._


	12. Derailed

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: We're at Javert Derailed. There are a LOT of thoughts and discussions of suicide in this chapter. Also trauma, grief, and dealing with injury.
> 
> The views Enjolras expresses here about suicide are not my views--these are my efforts to make sense of his characterization in the brick.
> 
> Stay safe everybody.
> 
> <3 Noel

_June, 1832_

Stealth is no trivial matter in the condition Enjolras is in. Neither is walking. His boot heels click a lurching staccato in the dark and fog. He stumbles against closed storefronts and dark cafe windows and clings to them to stay standing. His mind is not behaving properly--in the haze of exhaustion and pain it keeps slipping half into dream. The barricade looms in his memory, blurred with shadow and smoke, higher in his mind's eye than in life. He recalls Courfeyrac, talking fast, anxious and urgent despite the smile--he was trying to convince Father Mabeuf to go. It bothered Courfeyrac that the old man had come to die.

Enjolras focuses on Javert, ahead of him in the dark.

Javert does not look to the left or right. His hands are clasped behind him. He walks slowly but with purpose across the Place du Châtelet, approaching the dark expanse of the Seine. He stops a moment to gaze across the Pont au Change, and then he turns aside and walks along the quay towards the Pont Notre Dame.

Enjolras keeps close to the buildings across the street, watching that tall shape in its long, gray coat pass under the red lamplight. The sky is dull with clouds. Javert reaches a place near the Pont Notre Dame and stops, staring at the river.

The two bridges arch away to either side, pale over the great square lake between them, a roaring invisibility in the black. Beyond the unseeable flood, the spires of Notre Dame rise on one side, and the Palais du Justice looms on the other. Both are hardly visible, dark against the dark.

Javert removes his hat and lays it on the parapet. He stands with his head bowed.

Enjolras stops in the shadow of the buildings that face the river, certain at last. Death whispers in the air tonight over Javert. It whispered yesterday over everyone Enjolras loved. Death is coming for the traitor--Enjolras had felt it in the station house. He knows now how it is coming.

Many came to the barricade intending to die. Some of those who did were friends, and Enjolras did not stop them. He has always believed in a man's right to choose his fate.

He leans against a dark cafe window, grim, exhausted, and in pain, watching Javert's unmoving back.

All of last night he left Javert standing, trussed and bound to the post. They had no ammunition to waste on executing him--and, perhaps, if they were successful, they would not have to. If the revolution came, Javert would be tried in the courts of the Republic. Enjolras had not wanted another execution on his conscience.

But the revolution failed. Javert's compatriots gunned down Enjolras's friends, and they gunned down the child Gavroche while they laughed like hyenas. When the time came to order Javert's death, Enjolras was not sorry.

"The last man to leave will smash the skull of the spy," he had said. The brutality had tasted unfamiliar but sweet. Javert had not flinched.

An inspector of police exists to defend the tyranny of the king, the abuses of his fellow officers, and the pockets of the bourgeoisie. It is the nature of his office. These last days, Javert has done all that and more.

But with all Enjolras knows of Javert--and one learns much about a man when one unmasks him as a spy and keeps him bound in a place of war for fifteen hours--his behavior tonight does not fit. Javert as Enjolras understands him would not have let an insurgent go.

Part of Enjolras, the part that is angry and tired, wishes to believe there is some counterrevolutionary purpose to it. That he followed Javert because Javert is dangerous.

That is not why he followed.

Javert is not entirely motionless after all. His gray hair shivers against his bowed forehead, and when he shifts his hand upon the stone of the parapet, it trembles.

The light Enjolras has lived by, yesterday a blinding and luminous whole, feels broken apart and more than half obscured in fog and night. He had not understood it could break. He does not know what it means. He cannot see the way forward, though it was always before so clear.

Yet he perceives in Javert a spark, half-smothered. They two are the ones who came back, and there is a cold kinship in that. After the end of the world, when there was little to lose and nothing left to gain, Javert was kind.

The instinct to seek out those who wish to make the world better runs deeper in Enjolras than his instinct for war. It is stronger than his desire to flee or to sleep, and it is more persuasive than the logic that warns him Javert is an enemy.

Enjolras resumes his halting progress and reaches the parapet a few feet from Javert. He sways and finds even the act of bending to lean on it provokes shooting fire down his flank. He sags against the stone, panting. Javert registers his presence with a scowl.

"I have no right to stop you," Enjolras says.

"Good. Go away."

They stare at each other a long moment, then Javert's straight posture falls a little. Over the roar of the river, his breathing keeps hitching with what may be irritation, if it is not fear. Enjolras turns back to the flood and lets his head drop and his eyes shut. He can smell the unclean mist rising from the rapids and feel its chill on his face. The urge to sleep roars in his veins, mesmeric and resistless, tugging him away. He listens to Javert's uneven breathing and lets it tether him here.

"I believed you dead," Enjolras says. "I was curious why you were not."

"If you'd waited five minutes, I'd have had a better answer."

Enjolras looks up to see Javert baring his teeth and gums like this is funny. Enjolras lets his head fall again.

"Why?"

"You're just like this day," Javert growls. "One more damned ambiguity."

"Why?"

Javert says nothing.

"I assumed you would shoot me, bayonet me, or bring me somewhere for questioning. Why did you not?"

"Why didn't _you?"_

Javert's words slur into a guttural snarl, hardly intelligible. They hang in the roaring stillness anyway.

Enjolras's strength failed hours ago. He is battered and bloodied and can barely stand. The cold paving stones under his feet look comfortable. All his friends sleep on that bed. Paris is their pillow, and soon the earth of France will be their blanket. The cold infinity of it dizzies him.

He was suffused with hope once, with light and fire that flowed through him like a river. He tries to muster it. It takes effort; it never took effort before. But among the remaining fragments of the light, he finds enough.

He straightens and turns upon Javert the calm and level gaze which commanded an insurgency and gave an enemy army pause.

"At the barricade," he says quietly, "I considered it respectful to ask no man why he sought his death. I believed the matter belonged to the man alone."

Javert hunches his shoulders and averts his eyes.

"I am no longer certain I was right not to ask."

Javert's grunt is more like a growl.

"I do not ask you. But if you wish to speak, I will listen."

"Speak! To you, an insurgent, of why I, an agent of authority, came to the barricade? I had--" His gruff voice drops suddenly to a ragged breath. "Orders."

"I can imagine."

"I doubt it."

"People come to the barricades to die."

"Valjean didn't."

"Who is--? Ah. The man who disobeyed my order."

"To shoot me. Yes, that one."

"He was a friend of yours."

Without raising his head or moving an inch, Javert clenches with a fury that shakes his coat and jostles his hair against his face. Enjolras, difficult to intimidate, does not draw back, but he gathers himself as if menaced by a beast.

"Good God," Javert snarls, "that's to be my legacy! Believed to be a friend to damned parole-breaking fugitive life-sentenced _bagnard_ scum. Yes! Believe it, I deserve no less. Damn him!" Javert shouts this last over the water, standing for a moment tall and wild. Then he bows his back again and rests his elbows on the parapet. His hair falls over his low forehead into his eyes. He looks old and tired. He rubs his face and lets his hand fall.

"He was all those things?" Enjolras asks.

"He should have killed me. He had every reason. I persecuted him almost thirty-five years, off and on. He had your orders. With me dead, he was safe. He gave me his address. I wouldn't have left without it."

Standing hurts. Enjolras grapples with sleep like it is some dark angel ill-met upon a riverbank, and he is not winning. He shoves down the tiredness and grief, and he wills the pain far away from himself until it is only an abstraction, easily ignored. This body is fighting him, but his will is stronger than its weakness. He can wait out Javert's silence, and he does.

"I met him again," Javert says. "After, by accident. I--let him go. He'd carried a body all the way through the sewers. An insurgent. A dead man."

"Which insurgent?" Enjolras asks sharply.

"Couldn't see the face through the muck."

"Where was he taking the body?"

"Rue des Filles du Calvaire."

Enjolras knows the residences of all his lieutenants and any volunteers who attended at least one meeting; this is not among them. It is in the Marais, on a street of large, sleepy houses students do not generally reside in. Someone's rich relations, perhaps. He does not know the families of every volunteer, though he knows a few. Naturally, he knows the addresses of the relatives, lovers, and close associates of his lieutenants. But again, this street is not among them.

And yet, it is familiar. He can remember Courfeyrac mentioning it some time ago. He had dismissed it as irrelevant for some reason--a familial estrangement, he thinks. At last he remembers.

Marius.

"Dead?" he asks.

"Yes."

He feels the blow. Marius, who was always quiet until he was not, who loved with incomprehensible fervor a girl not even Courfeyrac had met and Buonaparte. Marius of iron stubbornness, who burned for mad lost causes, who had not attended a meeting in three years and whose politics overlapped with Enjolras's almost not at all, and yet who Enjolras knew belonged among them. Marius, who saved Courfeyrac and Gavroche and the barricade itself with such reckless bravery Enjolras declared him chief of it. Marius, years younger than the barricade's other leaders. Marius, who came to die and succeeded.

Enjolras had known Marius fell trying to reach the Corinth, but he had not been certain he was dead. One more fractured piece of the light in Enjolras falls away into shadow.

What arrogance, to think he could ever command such light. His head sinks and his shoulders fall.

"I fear you're another one," Javert says. "I can't tell. Authority seems dead, or else there's more--too much of it. All I see are the harms. I have to arrest him--I can't arrest him. Or you now, apparently. I can't enforce the law. I can't break the law. I can't live."

There is something in the harsh cadence of Javert's voice that tugs Enjolras towards a despair alien to him. He is tired and bewildered by days of death. He clings white-knuckled to the parapet, losing his sense of direction in the world.

"I understand," he says.

"Ha!"

"I desecrated the barricade with the execution of the murderer Le Cabuc. I condemned myself, and yet I live. I understand."

"You don't. It was not ... merely Jean Valjean." 

Enjolras says nothing. When Javert breaks the silence, his voice is a hoarse shadow of a voice.

"Do you wish to know my orders?"

"Yes."

"I was to be Claquesous."

"Claquesous."

"Your Le Cabuc was another police spy."

So the murder that stains him was at the government's instigation. The fatality of these last days tightens round Enjolras's neck like a noose. He feels it so viscerally he could gag.

Summary execution is murder. The killing of a spy is not. The man was a spy, but Enjolras did not know it. He believed it murder when he pulled the trigger. He is not absolved.

"And he was a criminal called Claquesous." Javert's voice is as somber and commonplace as if he were not dismantling the work of his life by this speech. "I'd recognize him with or without the mask, I've arrested him enough. I've watched him escape enough to know what he is. He was a police agent who murdered and stole for profit and pleasure and ate the bread of the government anyway. Half Patron-Minette seems something of the sort. As a younger man, I thought I'd never tolerate such things. My superiors told me to tolerate it, so I did. I once thought myself incorruptible. I was corrupted years ago.

"Le Cabuc did not act out of turn. He was acting under orders. I--" Javert convulses with a kind of shudder. "I had the same orders."

Enjolras watches the dark arch of his bowed back tremble.

"My superiors said, 'Spy on them. Bring us information.' They also said, 'Foment whatever trouble seems fitting. Dishonor them. Make them look like brutes.'"

"You gave yourself up," Enjolras says quietly, "before I finished asking your name."

"You asked why I came to the barricade to die. That's why."

Javert gazes at the buildings across the river and releases a bitter huff of breath that might be a laugh. "Probity. Sincerity. Candor. Duty. Self-denial. Sacrifice for the greater good. It all looked like one straight road. The true road. Maybe you know it." He grimaces and shrugs. "In your wrong-headed, bastardized fashion."

"Assume that I know."

"There's no road after all. It's some damned-- _goat path_ \--on a hillside. Do you city boys know goat paths? My superiors used to send me to chase escaped _bagnards_ through the _maquis_ [1] in the hills above Toulon. What looks like a path dead ends in impenetrable scrub. You're left on top of the hill, nothing to follow. You sight the real trail far below, miles from where you were told it would be.

"God is above me and there's no path ahead. I can do wrong one way or wrong some other way. There's nothing anymore that's right."

"That's what happened today?"

"Yes."

"So you came here--"

"To tender my fucking resignation."

"To God?"

"To God."

"Will you?"

"Is there a reason I shouldn't?"

Enjolras says nothing.

"I look back at the straight road behind me, and it's not there. I was efficient, yes, always. Incorruptible! I look back at what I thought were wrongs righted. I see prison cells and graves."

Enjolras's head is hazy. The world feels insubstantial. A dull, distant panic is growing inside him. He thinks of France, and the future, and his friends, and where there was light he finds shadows. He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them he is staring down into the cold, black river.

The water has a gravity. It tugs at him. _You will soon see to what I condemned myself,_ he thinks, and he shivers. He cannot formulate the thought, but it remains in his head, half-formed. It lulls him like the river's roaring.

 _"Don't,"_ Javert snarls, with such ferocity Enjolras startles and looks up. Javert has risen to his extraordinary height, glowering down with his teeth and gums bared. He places his huge, rough hand on the parapet in front of Enjolras, barring Enjolras from the river. "I don't mean _you."_

Once again, he is kind. Enjolras's panic eases. It is not the first time today he has turned from the face of death to find an outstretched hand.

From this, he understands that the light cannot be as dimmed as it looks. This veil of shadow he sees is a failing of a tired mortal body, not of the world. It is only Enjolras's own eyes that have gone dark. There is great comfort in that thought.

He nods meekly.

He turns from the river and slides painfully down to sit on the paving stones, facing the mundane shopfronts across the street. He rests his head against the low stone wall and shuts his eyes, shivering and unaccountably cold.

Instead of the river, he thinks of the clasp of Grantaire's hand, firm and warm. He pictures Combeferre by the glow of their sitting room fire, pushing up his glasses as he launched into some argument the two of them would companionably dispute all night. He remembers Prouvaire smiling sweetly in the light that streamed through the window onto his plants, patiently explaining to Enjolras the point of potted flowers. He remembers those first joyous, bruising battles as Bahorel taught him singlestick, savate, boxing, and fencing, when Enjolras was new to Paris and young and alone and had never before met anyone willing to teach him to fight; Bahorel had a keen eye for both fashion and concealment honed by years among secret revolutionaries, and Enjolras at eighteen had yet to achieved much competency in male dress--Bahorel must have known, but he never said a word. He remembers the first time Courfeyrac brought him, nervous and bristling, to a tailor's, and how as they stepped inside Courfeyrac had flashed him a grin that promised he would go down fighting if it came to it--it had ended in trousers and waistcoats rather than fisticuffs, but Enjolras never forgot. He remembers Feuilly drowsily explaining the plights of distant peoples as he nestled under a borrowed quilt on Enjolras's sofa when his landlord's neglect had once again rendered his own rooms uninhabitable. He remembers a wine shop and the foolish heat in his face and his blurred vision--and Bossuet's apologetic grin, for Bossuet had an uncanny knack for charming him into drinking too much, invariably on nights when Enjolras had class early. He remembers the soft, camphor-scented warmth of Joly's scarf round his neck as he walked home late on a snowy evening, and he remembers how fiercely Joly had insisted he borrow it.

He thinks of them, and he thinks of Javert's kindness tonight. These things exert a magic stronger than the cold dark of the river. It is a magic stronger than death. His breathing deepens and slows. The trembling stops.

Something knocks his boot.

Enjolras pries his eyes open. Javert crouches before him, wrinkling his snubbed nose and pushing up his lips in an extraordinary grimace.

"What'll you do now?" Javert grunts.

Javert believes himself to have given up on the world, and still he worries for Enjolras's safety. Enjolras is too exhausted to constrain the warmth in his smile; Javert's scowl deepens. Enjolras's eyes sink shut. Javert has to rap on his boot again before he remembers to answer.

"I'll be leaving by the diligence in three days."

"Three days!"

"Why not?"

"All you idiot children--you mulch yourselves under cannon fire like you've never seen an injury! I saw what they did, you won't be walking in three days, you're lucky if you stop pissing blood by next week. Clear your damned schedule!"

Enjolras has been largely ignoring the afflictions of his body. He lets his attention stray to it, and the pain is a shock. The brutal corners of the paving stones are driving into constellations of burning coals in his back, and his abdomen throbs with fire. If Joly or Combeferre were here--the memory of why they are not here catches him in the chest, and he stops breathing for a moment.

"How are you getting home?" Javert asks.

"Home," Enjolras says, and he pictures the empty rifle crates in the dining room, the unwashed coffee cups, the open door of Combeferre's bedchamber--and then, as if some guardian angel in his brain has snuffed out a candle, the image goes dark.

When he looks up, Javert is sitting beside him against the parapet, staring ahead at the closed shopfronts. He wears a scrunched, contorted expression that might be pity.

"I have no right to prevent you," Enjolras says, very fast. "I will not judge you. Whatever you choose tonight, you have my gratitude, and I will not judge--"

"Can you get where you're going?" Javert interrupts.

"Of course."

"There's no 'of course' about it!"

"They're dead," Enjolras snarls, though he is certain he intended to say something else. "What right do I have not to--"

"--Be able to walk?"

"Yes."

Javert nods. The mist of the river clings clammily to the back of Enjolras's neck, dampening his shirt.

"I want--" Enjolras says. "To know. I have no right to stop you. But I want to know if you lived. A month from today, I will leave by the diligence. The seventh. Dawn. Meet me."

"Meet you," Javert repeats.

"If you live until then. Meet me. I want to know if you lived."

There is a long silence.

"All right."

Enjolras nods and sinks back. His focus is slipping. Oblivion laps at the edges of his thoughts. Having noticed the pain, his efforts to push it away are coming to nothing. Javert is speaking, and he struggles to pay attention.

"--give me the address. You aren't the first criminal I perjured myself for tonight. The alternative is you're found here within the hour and shot on sight."

"Hm."

"Wake up!" Javert barks. "Tell me where you're going!"

Enjolras drags his head up with an effort. Being caught and killed here is no great matter, but giving Javert that address is. Enjolras has allies whom the location of their safe house would compromise. It is a question of trust, and a dangerous one.

His instincts have always been good. He believes them.

"I need your word you will not disclose it," he says.

Javert throws back his head and laughs in perfect silence for some minutes. Without sound, the laugh is only ferocity and teeth.

"My word!" he exclaims when he can speak. "You think my word is worth--"

"But," Enjolras interrupts, "an officer of the law cannot pledge his word in any way I would accept."

Javert goes still. His shadowy eyes are fixed on Enjolras's face.

"It is up to you whether I can accept your word," Enjolras says.

Javert's mouth twists into a snarl. "Men who can't walk don't bargain! You're the one who'll be arrested by the first patrol! Thirty-five years in government service--you think I'd throw it away for you?" Enjolras regards him until Javert curses and averts his face. "How do you know I won't lie?"

"I know."

Javert curses for some minutes more, and then he is silent some minutes. At last, he says, "I'm not leaving the police for you. I'm leaving the police. But not for you. And, my word? You have it."

"Good," Enjolras says, and he tells Javert the address of the safe house.

Having relinquished it, he sinks back against the parapet and cobblestones, beset by a bewildering exhaustion. His body is so heavy it may have turned to stone.

He must fall half into sleep, for when rough hands take hold of him, he flies into battle before he is quite awake. Only when he becomes aware of Javert cursing a long stream of invective does he manage to stop fighting and let Javert pull him to his feet.

There is walking, and pain, and walking. His mind drifts, unmoored. He is in spectacular pain. He leans against a tall shoulder beneath a long coat of rough wool. He has lost track of why. It is not in him to stomach easily this proximity to a stranger, but the man who walks with him flinches at the contact also, and that is some comfort. A harsh voice curses him without rancor. The curses become part of the rhythm, like their footfalls.

\--

Enjolras struggles back to awareness. They are close. The streets are gray with a cold and foggy dawn. His efforts to halt so resemble his efforts to walk it takes Javert some time to notice them.

"Look less like police," Enjolras mutters.

Javert growls, but he unbuckles the leather stock from his throat and unbuttons his coat and waistcoat before they continue.

Enjolras knocks on the side entrance of a ramshackle house. It is owned by an acquaintance of Bahorel's. The garret is rented with Enjolras's money.

"Well?" says a voice inside.

Enjolras gives the password. He hears the door unbolt, then footsteps hurry away into the depths of the house. He and Javert enter a short, dark hall with closed doors. Enjolras lurches towards the narrow door at the far end.

"Attic," he mumbles.

Javert mutters another curse.

Enjolras has never given much thought to this house. Planning their escape was not his priority. He gave no thought at all to the attic stairs.

They are barely wide enough to admit one man, let alone two. Each stair is of shallow depth and so high it might be a rung on a ladder. They were a minor effort for a tall man in good health. As he is now, it is something between crawling and being dragged. Javert does not abandon him to his fate at the foot, nor again halfway up, though his cursing grows louder. Enjolras lacks the breath to tell him to keep it down.

They reach the top, and Enjolras collapses against a wall, panting. The garret is dark and low, with a sloped ceiling. The morning twilight through the few grimy windows illuminates thin mattresses laid on the floor, all empty.

Enjolras only half-registers Javert grumbling over the small pile of supplies in the corner. He drags himself to the nearest mattress and sleeps at last.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. _Maquis:_ dense scrub vegetation found along the Mediterranean coast. [return to text]
> 
> Come find me on tumblr! @everyonewasabird


	13. A Net to Gather the Lost

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content notes: panic attacks, guns, references to suicide, swearing.

_August, 1833_

The noon sun reflects off the sunburnt grass and into Combeferre's window, waking him despite his efforts to sleep. His recollections of last night are jumbled. He is uneasy without recalling why. His head pounds, and there is an unpleasant unreliability to his stomach.

The day is hot already. Through his window drifts the combined assault of the factory fumes and the slaughterhouse. He buries his head under his pillow, and the straw through the worn ticking of his mattress sticks his cheek.

He recalls his conversation with Valjean and stiffens, embarrassed at such reckless disclosure. More hazily he remembers Madame Pontmercy in the hall, clinging to his arm with her face dead white as she swore him to secrecy. He sits up, gripped by dread.

There was a man. Madame Pontmercy exchanged with him some unremarkable pleasantries, they embraced, and the man left. Madame Pontmercy has never struck Combeferre as easily disturbed by trifles, but she would have fallen if he had not caught her. He failed to comprehend more of the matter for reasons which were manifestly his own fault.

He rubs his head with a groan, pours himself water from the pitcher, drinks it, and feels worse.

He thinks some troubling recollection yet eludes him. Pontmercy? No, Pontmercy was helpful, if not without frustrations. His offer to find Javert may come to nothing, but it is more than Combeferre had before. Pontmercy's grandfather was mercifully absent, and Pontmercy's aunt was surprisingly pleasant: a little saccharine on her favorite pious texts, but charmingly acerbic about books she disliked. If this feeling of disturbance does not arise from them, then--

He remembers Courfeyrac and his nebulous horror sharpens into focus.

Even last winter at his bleakest, Courfeyrac never expressed such vitriol. To speak of Enjolras's corpse, to call him a god--from anyone else it would constitute deadly offense. From Courfeyrac, who loved him, it is terrifying.

Combeferre had assumed Courfeyrac's unwillingness to speak of Enjolras was a matter of grief: of hating the thought of the barricade, or fearing to hope too much. If that was grief, it was a poisoned kind.

Combeferre rises in a hurry and dresses.

\--

Courfeyrac is not answering his door.

Perhaps, Combeferre thinks as he stands at a loss, he also slept late. Perhaps he is out on some errand. Combeferre has been knocking long enough that Courfeyrac's well-dressed, respectable-looking neighbors have begun opening their doors to scowl. He cannot ask them about Courfeyrac, for they will not know. He asked the portress on his way up, but she would not tell him anything.

Combeferre has always loved the faceless indifference of Paris. Paris was the first time in his life people in the markets paid him too little attention to think him odd or to remark over the depth of his myriad interests and the formality of his speech.

It strikes him now that in the country, when a woman has not been seen in the market for a week, when a man's behavior grows erratic, when a child routinely shows bruises beyond the usual lot of childhood, there is safety in the way everyone notices. Gossiping market women and servants and neighbors are an invisible fabric, a net to gather the strayed and lost.

The only nets in Paris are strung across the Seine at Saint-Cloud.

The barricade left marks on them all, some obvious, some concealed. It never occurred to Combeferre as he allowed Courfeyrac to hammer on his own door these past weeks that his silence posed anything but mild inconvenience. Now, listening to the quiet, he has no idea how frightened to be.

"I'll be back later," he tells the door at last. He tries to sound hearty, but his voice is hollow. "Count on it."

There is no sound from Courfeyrac's rooms as he leaves.

\--

The August afternoon is a furnace. Combeferre's mouth is dry, his stomach is sour, and his head aches. It is difficult to classify which are the legacies of last night, and which are fear. He cannot bear the thought of holing up in his room, stifled by worry.

He wanders from Courfeyrac's building, uncomfortable among the fashionable promenaders of the Chaussée d'Antin, and finds himself on the broad and gleaming Boulevard des Italiens, that magnet for all those with money and the leisure to spend it. The clatter of carriages and the noise and gaiety of the fashionably dressed drive him back into smaller side streets until he reaches the humbler tangle of more familiar neighborhoods. Automatically he avoids the streets of too much memory and reaches the Seine at last, where he leans his elbows on the parapet and shuts his eyes against the afternoon glare. He is restless, and tired, and worried.

But he is not alone in caring about Courfeyrac. In the darkest parts of last winter, it was not his own efforts that helped--quite the contrary. It stings that Pontmercy could do what he could not, but what does his petty jealousy matter?

He turns from the quai and bends his steps north again, this time into the Marais.

\--

It feels strange to knock on a door he departed scant hours earlier. He is conscious of his face hastily shaven, his uneven cravat, and the predations of the afternoon heat on his shirt and hair. The porter's offended glance suggested the effect he produces is not mere imagination. He should have gone home and changed, and he could not bear to.

He hears the door unlatch and braces himself to explain to the inevitable servant.

Instead, inexplicably, Pontmercy opens it himself. He stares up at Combeferre with exhausted blankness, like a man too tired to be surprised.

"Thank God," Pontmercy says. "I suppose Courfeyrac thought to send for you. That was good of him. For God's sake, come in."

Combeferre was a doctor long enough to recognize a house where tragedy has struck. Without a word, he follows Pontmercy inside.

"Sorry," Pontmercy says, looking around the ornate hall like he has never seen it before. "I'm sorry. I should offer you something, I suppose. She's resting. I think--I hope she is. I don't want to wake her by checking too often."

Daylight streams through the windows in the adjoining rooms, and Combeferre clings to the hope that the curtains would be drawn were someone dead. He can hear the querulous grumbling of Pontmercy's grandfather drawing nearer.

"Might we speak in the library?"

"I think so."

Pontmercy leads him into the library and falls into one of the chairs. Combeferre takes the other.

"What happened?"

Pontmercy blinks, looking more tired than ever. "You don't know?"

"No."

"Valjean left."

Combeferre remembers in an instant his fears of last evening. His worry over Valjean's possible departure had prompted him to confide a story he perhaps should not have, for who knows what effect it had? But he had not imagined the flight could come so soon.

He thinks of Madame Pontmercy's grief and fear for her father; he should never have avoided her all those weeks. It is with some trepidation he inquires: "And Madame Pontmercy?"

"Oh God. I wasn't home when she discovered it. I came back and--oh God."

Pontmercy stares at the carpet with a blankly puzzled frown. In the early days, before he stopped coming to the Musain, he used to sit alone at a table for hours this way. Only now does Combeferre understand this is what Pontmercy in distress looks like. The thought discomfits him, for it sheds light on certain exchanges with which Combeferre might, perhaps, reproach himself.

"She was kneeling," Pontmercy says. He swallows and looks up. "On the floor of her father's bedchamber--all his things were gone. Her face was chalky. She was shaking all over. She didn't react when I touched her, she kept staring ahead like she didn't see me. I was so afraid she was never going to--"

Pontmercy chokes and bows his head. He remains some moments thus. Combeferre hands him a handkerchief, which he presses to his face.

"Then she looked up at me, terrified, like Judgment Day had come and I was the wrath of God. She told me it was her fault, that it was all her fault. I assured her it wasn't, it was her fault the least of all of us. I called for help, but it took us so long to get her out of there. I was so afraid I'd hurt her if I forced it. The doctor came and gave her some brandy, and she's been quiet since. I haven't dared leave her for long, I've been checking on her--"

The library door creaks open, and Combeferre looks up sharply to find Courfeyrac slipping inside.

He looks tired. His cravat is askew, and his mass of curly hair sticks out in tufts because he tugs it when he worries. Combeferre's heart makes a desperate little leap, like the weightless feeling one gets in a hurrying carriage when the road dips suddenly from beneath the wheels.

Pontmercy starts up in hope and terror.

"Nothing," Courfeyrac says. He comes over and drops a crumpled list on the table beside them. "Your father-in-law has a damnable lot of boltholes, but he isn't in them. I had to make a nuisance of myself at some and a cat burglar of myself at others, but I got a look at them all."

Pontmercy makes a soft noise. Courfeyrac sits on the arm of his chair and grips his shoulder, then he glances up with a wan smile.

"Good to see you, Combeferre."

"You also." Combeferre must say it with too much feeling, for Courfeyrac reaches across and squeezes his arm.

There are shadows around Courfeyrac's eyes. He has not looked at either of them for longer than a passing glance.

"I don't know if you understand," Pontmercy says. "She never breaks. I seem to break all the time, but she's always cheerful and steady for me. I have to be that, I _will_ be that, but I've never seen--will you talk to her?" It is not until he adds, "You're a doctor," that Combeferre realizes Pontmercy means him. He tears his eyes from Courfeyrac.

"People trust you, you--" Pontmercy wrestles with his voice a moment. "You always know what to say."

Combeferre is perfectly unnerved.

"Certainly," he says.

\--

The sun glows red against the drawn curtains of the Pontmercys' bedroom. An imperceptible breeze tugs them, making the darkness brighten and dim. The atmosphere is hot and close. Combeferre stands in the doorway, peering into the dimness.

The bed curtains are open, and the white sheets are rumpled and piled up. There may be a figure within, but he cannot tell. 

"Cosette?" Pontmercy steps past Combeferre and goes to the bed. He says a few words to its occupant, then he nods to Combeferre and withdraws, leaving them alone.

"Madame Pontmercy?"

"I'm not asleep, Monsieur."

Combeferre draws an armchair near. Madame Pontmercy lies in the shadows, quiet and pale, with a cold cloth on her forehead. He has never seen her anything but full of life, mistress of herself and whatever room she was in. With her hair tied back, her pale lips unsmiling, and her large eyes staring from shadowy hollows, she looks terribly young. It strikes him that she cannot be more than seventeen or so. He is almost twice that.

"How do you feel, Madame?"

She says nothing. He lifts her hand from the coverlet and checks her pulse. It is quick and hard, belying her stillness.

"I understand you suffered some species of hysterical attack. May I ask, have you experienced symptoms of hysteria in the past? That is, convulsions or loss of consciousness, attacks of unexplained laughter or weeping, irregularities in digestion or menstruation?"

"No, Monsieur."

Her voice is quiet, as passive as the rest of her. She watches him with no expression he can read, and then she says, "Will you tell them?"

"Tell them?"

She says nothing. Combeferre is thinking very fast.

He has more information than anyone else, but he knows less than he should. He sits back, contemplating her a moment. Then he rises and closes the chamber door before returning to his seat.

"Madame, who was the man last night?"

There is a startled flash in her eyes, and then she is blank again. "No one," she says, turning away. "A nightmare."

"Is he related to your father's disappearance?"

She is silent a moment, then she says, "He didn't cause it."

"But he is related to it."

He watches her averted cheek and her uneven breathing beneath the snowy coverlet.

"I am a doctor, Madame," he says quietly. "Or I was one once. And I am enough older than you to have committed far more sins. I know what of I speak. Madame--tell someone."

She starts, frightened. He goes on before she can pretend not to understand.

"It certainly need not be me, and no matter what the world says, it needn't be your husband. But I promise, the truth in such cases is a stronger and more healthful drug than any a doctor can prescribe."

She shuts her eyes. A tear slides down her cheek.

"All of it is conditional," she says. "Isn't it? My mother stumbled, and she died for it. My father stumbled, and he suffered for years, and now he may be--"

She sits up and hugs her knees in the bed, breathing muffled sobs into her folded arms. The ruffles of her nightgown shudder on the back of her neck beneath the weight of her braid.

"You are surrounded by people who care for you," Combeferre says. "My friends and I are much reduced of late, but we have not undone the knots that tie us together. We will not let you fall."

"You're kind, Monsieur. But you don't know."

"May I open the curtains?"

She nods, so he rises and does so. August breathes into the room like a warm, sweet sigh. The gold light of late afternoon brightens the snowy bedclothes and picks out threads of copper from her hair.

They sit quietly a moment, and then Combeferre says, "Forgive me; last night I laid out my own sad history for your father. It seemed to me something he needed to hear, and I hope and trust it did him no harm. I cannot tell what troubles you, precisely. But were I a wiser and braver man, I would lay out my sins for you, so you would know that whatever you have done, it is not the worst thing anyone has done."

Madame Pontmercy looks up with wet cheeks and the lids and sclera of her eyes red with weeping. She frowns like he has said something to puzzle her. He cannot but think puzzlement is preferable to despair.

"And I can't," he admits heavily. "There were dark days last year, and I can't look at them. So I hope it will not make you believe me less when I say--no, Madame. It is not conditional."

She watches him a moment, then she lays her cheek back on her knees and holds out her hand. He takes it.

"Thank you," she whispers. Her bent back shudders for some time, though she keeps hold of his hand. At last, she whispers, "Thénardier."

Whatever Combeferre was expecting, it was not that. He steadies his voice. "Have you seen him before last night?"

"Not since I was a child." She seems to hesitate, but she only shakes her head.

"Is there anything more you will tell me?"

"No, Monsieur."

He waits, but she does not speak.

"It would be best you had some distraction: a book if you'll take nothing else. But I would far rather you had a friend to speak to." 

He catalogues the house's inhabitants in his mind and finds them unsatisfactory. He likes Mademoiselle Gillenormand well enough, but it is clear the relations between her and her nephew's wife are hardly cordial. No one else springs to mind as remotely appropriate.

"You seem not to have a lady's maid or any other such confidante in this house, is that not so? Unless your Nicolette--"

"No."

"I know little of fine houses, but that seems a poor way to arrange one, and I'd recommend fixing it. But in the mean time, tell me: is there some friend whose company would comfort you?"

She shakes her head sadly. "Papa and I kept to ourselves for many years, Monsieur. I really have not met many--"

A thought seems to strike her, and she glances up with a sudden shyness he has not seen before.

"Unless... do you think it possible Musichetta would come?"

Combeferre smiles and feels like weeping.

"I think, Madame, you are in grave danger of getting Joly and Bossuet also, for they are difficult to keep away from anyone who needs cheering up. But you are in very little danger of not getting Musichetta."

"Oh," she says, and her shy smile brightens.

\--

The library is empty when Combeferre returns, leaving him somewhat at a loss. He searches the house for Courfeyrac and Pontmercy, hoping he finds them before he runs into Pontmercy's grandfather. Mercifully, he finds Basque who points him to the garden.

The courtyard is warmer than inside, but there is peace in the vibrant summer's day that was absent from the dark, still interior. The air smells of baked earth and warm leaves and late summer flowers. The sun has passed beyond the roof, taking the worst of the heat. Combeferre makes his way among the fruit trees and drifting butterflies towards the soft voices he hears down the path.

Courfeyrac and Pontmercy are sitting on the bench. Courfeyrac is smiling as he talks, coaxing Pontmercy back towards good humor. 

How long has Combeferre been letting Courfeyrac's easy smile deceive him that all is well? It must be months now.

Pontmercy catches sight of Combeferre and turns pale.

"Somewhat better, I think," Combeferre says. "She asked for you--she believes she is well enough to get up. She also would like Musichetta sent for, and I suggest you do it. Great grief is a sickness, and a good friend's ear is the only cure I know."

Pontmercy thanks him several times over, but Combeferre's eye is on Courfeyrac. Pontmercy hurries away, and they hear the door shut behind him. At the sound, Courfeyrac deflates, leaning his elbows on his knees.

His hair has grown out since prison, and his body has regained its healthy roundness, and still, he has never looked more like that gaunt stranger in the courthouse more than half a year ago.

"How is it you fold double meanings into everything you say?" Courfeyrac's smile looks thin.

"I went looking for you today."

"I know."

"Do you?"

"I had to stop home for a moment on my way. You caught me."

"Ah."

"Sorry I ignored you."

"I believe I've more than earned it."

"No, not at all. I know what you're like. You wouldn't be you if you didn't hole up indoors for months at a time on some project or other."

"Nevertheless. I'd neglected to realize how frightening it might be not to know what was happening on the other side of the door."

Courfeyrac flinches. "Damn. Sorry. I'm sorry."

"Courfeyrac."

Courfeyrac winds his fingers restlessly in his hair and swipes his hand across his eyes, which redden and glisten. Combeferre sits down on the bench.

"Don't be nice, I can't bear it," Courfeyrac says. "I need to hold together for their sakes. Dear God, Nicolette showed up at my door this morning looking desperate, and I dashed over here."

As he speaks, Combeferre ventures a hand onto his back. Courfeyrac sighs softly, so he moves it in slow circles, until he has pulled Courfeyrac into his arms. Courfeyrac goes easily, like one who had been hoping to be persuaded.

"I heard Cosette sobbing down the hall so I ran to some room I'd never been in. They were both kneeling on the floor, she was weeping like the world had ended, and Marius had his arms around her, staring up at me. For a moment, all I could think was, 'Thank God I lived. Thank God I lived, I don't want either of you looking like this without me here.'"

Combeferre kisses his cheek, which is wet. Perhaps his own composure is not much better, for he kisses it several more times and buries his face against Courfeyrac's shoulder.

"Let me help."

"I'm all right."

"Evidently."

"I need to--like I said."

"Be strong for them? Good. Be weak for me and strong for them. They will send for Musichetta, who no doubt will bring company, and when you have ascertained the Pontmercys will be well without you--"

"Well?"

"We'll leave together, and you can talk to me."

There is a moment's silence. "About?"

"About whatever eagle is eating your liver that you think is so unspeakable you have to hide it from me."

"Oh, _that."_ Courfeyrac attempts to laugh. "There are at least two of them. I think they share me out on a rotating basis. Which one did you want me to introduce you to?"

"The one you fear more."

"Damn," he says softly. "Damn you very much."

But he keeps his head on Combeferre's shoulder. They sit this way until Courfeyrac wipes his face and tames his hair as best he can and says he wants to go in to see how the Pontmercys are faring.

\--

Madame Pontmercy has wrapped her hair in a turban and donned a dressing gown. She looks like herself once more, if softer and sadder. She sits on the drawing room sofa beside her husband and manages a small smile when they enter, though the haunted look has not left her eyes. Pontmercy holds her hand and watches her face.

"Pardieu!" Courfeyrac says, beaming, "Madame, I'm glad to see you better."

He pulls a chair over and takes both their hands, talking with easy kindness. They relax as he speaks. Perhaps the three of them force their laughter a little, but Combeferre contents himself that the affection on all sides seems real. He drops into an armchair and shuts his eyes, relieved not to be needed for the moment.

Why did she greet Thénardier? For God's sake, why embrace him? He is mystified.

But Pontmercy also spoke to Thénardier. It is perhaps an unkind calculation, but Pontmercy is assiduous with debts, and he is in Combeferre's debt today. If Combeferre asks why Thénardier came, Pontmercy may tell him. He will inquire when Pontmercy is less occupied. For the moment, he is happy to be quiet.

In an hour, Musichetta comes. Joly and Bossuet are with her, and the two men seize a half-bewildered Pontmercy and draw him away into some laughing argument. Musichetta steals his place on the sofa. 

She and Madame Pontmercy bend their heads together, talking quietly. Madame Pontmercy giggles and turns pink, the first color in her face all day.

As they settle in, Combeferre takes his leave, enjoining both Pontmercys not to hesitate to contact him. Courfeyrac gets up and offers to share his fiacre. They make their way into the foyer, picking their hats from among the hats assembled.

"Are you hungry?" Courfeyrac asks. "There's a good little _traiteur_ a short distance from me, we can bring food back to my rooms. You really need to try their--"

"I found him," says Pontmercy from the doorway, and Combeferre's blood freezes.

Courfeyrac whirls round. "Marius, what the devil? If you've found Valjean--"

"No." Pontmercy is staring at Combeferre. "Javert. I went by the police station early. That's why I was out. That's how I left her alone to face that empty room. But I learned it before this bad business became clear, and someone should get something out of today. And I owe you for earlier. Rue de la Caille, number three."

It is something like being struck by lightning. Combeferre is galvanized and paralyzed all at once. 

"There's--more." Pontmercy looks odd, almost frightened. "Javert was dishonorably dismissed right after the barricade."

Combeferre had known Javert left the police, but not on what terms. His heart is beating very fast.

"Dismissed," he repeats.

"There was a mix-up the night of the sixth. An insurgent was brought to a station house, against regulations. Javert disliked how the men were handling it, and he wrote a memo to his superiors urging they be disciplined. They weren't, of course. But the next morning, the insurgent had vanished."

Combeferre tries to speak and does not manage it.

"Javert was dismissed over the disappearance. The sergeant I talked to didn't know or wouldn't tell me more."

There were hundreds of insurgents in the city that day. Other barricades had far more survivors than the Rue de la Chanvrerie. Combeferre likes to think himself a logical man: it is vanishingly unlikely the insurgent was one of theirs. Yet he cannot stop thinking it. He cannot rid himself of the thought it was Enjolras.

Only slowly does he become aware again of the dark foyer and Courfeyrac and Pontmercy beside him. Voices are laughing in the other room. He has crushed his hat in his sweating hand. Pontmercy's worried eyes stare at him. Combeferre wonders if Pontmercy sees the same horrors he himself is imagining.

Courfeyrac laughs lightly and pats his shoulder.

"Go, by all means! I'll keep for another night. Pontmercy, give my regards again to your wife."

He tips his hat and wheels round, heading for the door. Not ungently, Combeferre takes hold of his arm and halts his progress.

"Pontmercy, I'm immensely grateful for your assistance."

"Of course," Pontmercy says. "And if there's anything else I can do--you'll keep me informed?"

"Naturally."

Combeferre is dizzy with suppositions as they make their way down the stairs. They reach the street and walk in search of a fiacre.

"I know what it means," Courfeyrac says, "I'm as afraid for him as you are. You should go. Of course he needs you more."

This is a quiet street inhabited by old men who go to bed early; no one will be watching. Combeferre tilts Courfeyrac's face up to the light. Courfeyrac's stare is a little wild, and he grins a little too much.

"You promised me dinner," Combeferre says mildly.

He retakes Courfeyrac's arm, and they walk on.

\--

Dinner is student food, cheap and half cold by the time they lay it out on Courfeyrac's table. Courfeyrac lives a stone's throw from cafés and restaurants that are famous halfway round the world, and Combeferre appreciates not having to face one of those tonight. The smell of greasy meat pies carried home is the smell of countless happy, late-night arguments with friends. It comforts him, even if the memory makes his heart hurt a little.

By tacit agreement, they speak only of trivialities while they eat.

"Well," Courfeyrac says at last, tossing his napkin down. "Shall we begin? Or end. Maybe it's more like an ending."

"Let's move to the sofa," Combeferre says.

The sitting room looks cheerful in the bright light of the lamps. Courfeyrac sits in an armchair, then he stands and paces, then he sits on the sofa beside Combeferre, jiggling his leg. A moment later he is up again, tugging at his hair.

Combeferre waits quietly.

"You don't, you never--" Courfeyrac rubs his hands over his face. "Oh God, I've spent all night trying to find a way to say it, and I don't have one. You were eloquent. He was eloquent. I was--I don't know what I was."

"Kind," Combeferre says quietly.

Courfeyrac kicks a sturdy bookcase and stares at it. "I suppose that's me, isn't it? The palatable face of war."

Something in the room seems to settle.

"The friendly fellow." Courfeyrac strikes the bookcase with his fist before he resumes pacing. "The recruiter. 'A pupil!' I would say to the assembled secret society, with a broad wink, like some schoolboy playing at war as I turned one more bright young man over to Enjolras. We thought we knew what war was. We all saw eighteen-thirty in some form or other. It's different when you lose."

"It is."

"It isn't!" Courfeyrac exclaims. "If he were here, he would explain how it isn't. Wouldn't he? He'd explain the sacrifices so it all made sense, he wouldn't cringe behind fancy cravats and dinner parties like a coward, playing the marriageable bachelor and letting himself become everything he hates. I'm lying, of course--what have I ever liked better than pretty girls and nice clothes? I'm only becoming what I've always been."

Combeferre watches his smile turn bitter and fall away.

"Come sit with me," Combeferre says.

Courfeyrac drops onto the sofa, staring ahead at the room. His mouth is twisted, and the warm, freckled brown of his cheeks is flushed in the lamplight. His eyes are furiously wide to keep the tears from falling.

"I loved him," he says. "I loved you. I loved them all--and I recruited half of them. Is that the half who are dead? No, it can't be, far more than half are dead."

"You blame yourself."

"I blame _him._ And you too, but mostly him. I never admired anybody like I admired Enjolras. I would have died for him, and I thought I was going to. God forgive me, I could hate him some days. I look back and all I see is the future that didn't come and everyone we got killed."

It is difficult to breathe. For the first time in months, Combeferre recalls the startling, fiery cold of the bayonet and how the air went out of him. He presses the heel of his hand hard against the hard lump of scarring beneath his clavicle, palpable through his shirt and waistcoat. It takes a certain balance of pressure to massage it without raising strange twinges from the half-benumbed nerves.

"So you're done with him," he says.

Courfeyrac curses and jumps up to pace again.

"No! And yes--I've no sensible answer, which is half of why I'm too much of a coward to face him."

Combeferre bows his head, thinking of a thousand conversations with Courfeyrac and Enjolras. All are full of warmth in his memory. All are haloed in gold. If family ever has meant anything to him, it means the three of them.

With patient desolation, he opens the doors of his mind to the supposition that that is over. He lets his hands unclench, and he watches Courfeyrac's tormented pacing with sad fondness.

"All right."

"I'm wrong!" Courfeyrac exclaims. "I'm one more useless bourgeois looking to cajole a woman into marrying me so I can forget my wayward youth and slink back to the Dordogne where my predestined law practice is waiting. Because there is one, you know. My father arranged it all--all I have to do is say the word and they'll gild the damned sign for me."

This news is not like losing Courfeyrac all over again. It is surely nothing like that. 

"I didn't know that."

"I was the fiery one, you remember? I used to argue circles around you. Don't you think I'd make a fine prosecutor?"

"Never."

"You're generous! But if I could convince myself I was a revolutionary, I surely can convince myself of this. I'll count myself out another thirty pieces of silver every time I send one more Jean Valjean to the bagne or the guillotine, and I'll end my days a rich old man if I make it that long."

"Courfeyrac."

"God. Sorry, I'm sorry. I don't really mean that. You don't need to worry."

"Come back over here."

Courfeyrac comes and stands over him, looking exhausted.

It sounds absurd, yet if Combeferre squints, he can see it: Courfeyrac the conservative bourgeois, comfortably and unhappily entombed in his country home. Courfeyrac the prosecutor, hand in glove with the police. He imagines all Courfeyrac's youthful affectionateness dried up and turned to stone, for society will not tolerate in grown men what it will in younger ones, and it has nothing but mockery for men like Combeferre who never outgrow a preference for male affections. Courfeyrac is not such a man; he can walk away from their youthful radicalism in ways Combeferre never can, and he has a family name and fortune that will open the doors of bourgeois society to him.

It is not entirely mad to imagine Courfeyrac with his soul deadened by long, drab years in the company of lawyers, senators, bishops, and some advantageous and unhappy marriage. He could outgrow his openheartedness and kindness and fire. That path exists.

"Fuck that," Combeferre says.

He pulls Courfeyrac down to lie on the sofa and lies alongside him, wrapping his arms around him as tightly as he can. He buries his face in Courfeyrac's shoulder, breathing harshly. Courfeyrac makes a token noise of protest and melts against him.

"Part ways with Enjolras if you must," Combeferre says. "Reevaluate your politics if you wish, God knows I've been doing that for years. Choose an occupation, and if your youthful self would blush with scorn at it a little, that's the common lot of mankind. But if you dare murder everything you believe in because it seems like the path of least resistance, I will recruit Joly and Bossuet, I'll explain the matter to Madame Pontmercy, I'll bury the hatchet with Pontmercy and talk him through his backwards nonsensical politics until I make him understand, and I swear in the name of God that all of us will fight you if you take another step down this absurd road of sacrificing yourself to please your family."

He constructed this as a rational argument in his head and is surprised to discover himself choking on sobs by the end.

Courfeyrac shifts around to face him, smiling with his eyes full of tears. "All right."

"If you can't find your way out of it yourself, we will find a way out of it for you, we will kidnap you if we have to, we will prevent this--"

Courfeyrac settles his hand on Combeferre's back, stroking gently. "I said all right."

But Combeferre has several impeccably constructed points he has not yet made, and he must explain them because they are rational and important, and if he has also been seized by a hysterical terror over the infinite fragility of everyone he loves, that is an unrelated matter. 

"And I've _met_ your father, he's a damned moderate liberal but he's nothing worse than that, and if I explained what his plan would do to you he would be on my side, and your sisters also..."

"I know," Courfeyrac says, running his hand in a slow circle over Combeferre's back.

Combeferre continues arguing for another hour.

\--

He must fall asleep, for he wakes some time later, still lying on the sofa with his cheek on Courfeyrac's shoulder. It is still dark--darker, in fact. The only lamp still lit glimmers soft gold on the ceiling. His head is quiet now, though his face is hot and aching. He cannot remember whether he finished his arguments.

Courfeyrac, awake, is also quiet, with no signs of that tension that has been plaguing him. He seems relaxed under Combeferre's weight, and his hand moves idly on Combeferre's arm. He gazes out over the room, thoughtful.

"Do you still believe in it?" he asks.

He means the future, or else he means revolution: the brotherhood and equality of man, the end of fighting, the end of poverty; universal suffrage, education, and medicine. Disease will be cured, surgery will be painless, man will tame the skies, and the factories will belong to the workers. The nineteenth century shall be great, and the twentieth century will be happy, and children will grow up healthy and safe and educated. Women will live with the same freedom and education as their brothers. Men will not be chained: not as prisoners, not as property, not for anything. Slavery of all kinds will be effaced from the earth.

There are different meanings of the word _believe:_ there is belief that a thing will come to pass, and there is belief that a thing is right. The latter at least is true.

"Yes," Combeferre says.

"I know," Courfeyrac says, frowning at the room. "The problem is me. Nothing changed because of the rebellion. Everything that was true when we planned it is true now. I saw so clearly in the days before it, and so badly ever day that followed--you know Bossuet and Joly and Musi never stopped?"

"What?"

"You need to visit people more. It's not a secret from you, they've just never had a chance to say it."

Combeferre props himself up on his elbow, frowning. _"What?"_

"Nobody meets people behind closed doors more easily than a doctor with a private clinic. Nobody's better for an informal chat in some dark tavern than Bossuet. No one has better cover for moving banned publications around than Musichetta. I think they started last summer, soliciting donations for jailed insurgents--legal, above-board sorts of things. Later, they went further. All our networks went dark after last June, but they've been relighting the candles. I should help more."

"You're the one the law knows about," Combeferre says. "The police watch you especially."

But they do not especially watch Combeferre, and he feels a pang of guilt. He too should have kept at it. Worse, he is not connected enough to know Joly and the others did.

He has wandered almost out of reach of the networks his friends built. Perhaps he has wandered too far to be much use.

"I'm glad someone is still working," he says, lying down again.

"And I'm glad you're looking for him."

"Are you?"

"I want him alive and all right--of course I do. You talk about finding him, you say maybe he lived, and I think: yes, with all my heart, I don't want him dead. I just don't know how I can look him in the eye again."

Combeferre stares out over the shadows of the room, at the glossy brocade and striped green damask all gilded by the lamplight. It is a little absurd in its ornateness, but he is fond of it because it is Courfeyrac.

"You spoke of another eagle," he says.

"Eagle?"

"Eating your liver."

"Oh, that." Courfeyrac lies quietly a moment. "Will you think less of me if I beg for mercy and promise to tell you another time?"

"Of course not."

"Because it's been, I don't know if you've noticed, something of a _day._ In fact, I'm invoking the June Rules again if you'll allow it."

Combeferre thinks back to the nights of June he spent here, some in Courfeyrac's bed, some on a mattress on Courfeyrac's floor. He shuts his eyes and settles his head back on Courfeyrac's shoulder.

"The June Rules are that I have to stay over?"

"Those are the ones, yes."

"Done."

\--

He sleeps better than he has in days, but still he wakes with a feeling that something inside him has been scraped raw. Even in the broad morning daylight, he feels compelled to touch Courfeyrac too much, as if to prove he is still here. Courfeyrac hugs him back every time.

By the light streaming through Courfeyrac's tall windows, they drink coffee and eat pastries from a shop on the corner. They do not speak of it, but they both know where Combeferre is going.

When Combeferre rises and dons his coat, Courfeyrac goes into the other room. He returns, holding out to him a small steel pistol.

Combeferre stares at it a long moment, then he shakes his head. Courfeyrac nods and puts it away again.

"None of it means I don't want to know," Courfeyrac says as he comes back in. "You understand me? If you learn anything-- _anything_ \--about him, you'll tell me?"

Combeferre embraces him one more time.

"I will tell you."

\--

The address Pontmercy gave him is in the extreme south of Paris, close to the Barrière d'Enfer, in a more forsaken and exiled spot than Combeferre's own lodgings. There is nothing here but overgrown empty fields, the battered huts of ragpickers, and the grounds of various institutions: the maternity hospice, the foundling hospital, and the Observatory. The broken-down huts and shacks look lifeless and probably are not. The very solidity of the ground is illusory, for it is hollowed out by abandoned limestone mines and the catacombs, all haunted by men who dare not show their faces in daylight.

Number three, Rue de la Caille is a single-story hovel, a peasant hut without a countryside. The roof is thatch, the plaster wall is crumbling, and there is no window visible from the street.

Combeferre stands in the street in the shadow it casts.

He is not afraid. It is like surgery. It is like war. One is not afraid at those times, for there is not time to be.

He knocks. When no one answers, he keeps knocking.

At last the door swings inward, and an old man fills the threshold. Combeferre is tall, but the old man towers half a foot taller. His bulldog jaws bristle with thick, gray whiskers. His coat is gray and old. Everything about him is gray except that under his bristling eyebrows and gray hair stare black eyes so empty they might be dead.

It is Javert.

Dark days roar back into Combeferre's brain: bullets flew, the air was thick with smoke, and Combeferre's friends circulated back and forth before this man's sneer in the last hours of their lives.

The palm of Combeferre's hand itches to grip the cold weight of Courfeyrac's pistol. Had he brought it, he would not be able to prevent himself from touching it.

"Javert," he says. "I would prefer to speak inside. I will speak in the street if necessary."

Javert stares back in silence. Then he walks away into the house, leaving the door open. Combeferre follows.

The inside is bare plaster and little else. The floor is earth, packed hard and swept clean. A single rude window lets in a little light. A tin plate and cup sit on a table in a corner that must serve as a kitchen. A curtain in another corner hides what must be a bed. Two wooden chairs are the only other furniture.

Javert sits in one of the chairs, stretching out his long legs and folding his arms. Even seated, he takes up all the space in the room and seems to suck out all the air. Combeferre remains standing as Javert casts his rude gaze over him.

"Second in command," Javert grunts. "Théophile Combeferre: the medical student with the guns. Most of them came with one gun, or a rusty sword, or nothing at all." Javert's grin cracks sideways, showing large, flat teeth. "You brought an arsenal."

The itch in Combeferre's hand grows worse.

"Yes," he says.

Javert smiles hideously, all teeth and gums and a wrinkle that forms in a circle around his large, snubbed nose. "You took your damned time coming here."

"Where is Enjolras?"

"Not an assassination, then? Pity."

"The night after the barricade. You saw him."

"Well?"

It is confirmation. Combeferre shudders all up and down his body, as if the man's big hand has broken through his sternum and squeezed his heart. He imagines Javert amused by so visible a reaction--but if Javert is laughing, Combeferre cannot detect it. He has little idea whether he can trust anything Javert says. He cannot recall instances of Javert lying, but that is not the same as being trustworthy.

"Where is he?"

"South. Parents were mentioned."

_"He_ mentioned them. Enjolras mentioned his parents."

"Yes."

"Enjolras told you he was going to his parents?"

Javert narrows his eyes as if annoyed at Combeferre's obtuseness. Combeferre clenches his fists and waits for the answer. 

Javert sighs. "Yes."

"That's impossible."

Combeferre has seen Enjolras after a few hours in his parents' company: empty-eyed, expressionless, speechless, reduced to blasted ashes of himself. He would not go back by choice. He has not gone back in all the years Combeferre has known him.

There is, too, a circumspection to Javert's sentences, a specific avoidance that implies he knows things about Enjolras he absolutely should not know. It is terrifying.

"He said that to you."

"Yes."

"When did he depart?"

"Seventh of July last year."

"You're certain?"

"Yes."

"You saw him, identified him, spoke to him, and you did not arrest him?"

"No."

"Why?"

Javert grunts and shrugs. "I've told you where he went. That's enough."

"No." Combeferre paces the tiny room. "What happened? Why would he ever go back?"

Javert pushes his lower lip upward in a grimace, looking perfectly uninterested in speculating on Enjolras's motives.

"That night," Combeferre says. "Something happened at a station house. That's what the man on duty said. An insurgent was brought there. Guardsmen were doing something wrong. They said you were dismissed over it. Was that him?"

"Yes."

"What happened?"

For the first time, some emotion harsher than disinterest passes over Javert's face. He grunts and shakes himself as if disturbed.

"Violence unbefitting the agents of authority of a great nation. You want details?"

Combeferre freezes, staring at the gray plaster of Javert's wall. "Yes."

He grows infinitely colder as Javert tells him.

When Javert is finished, Combeferre says, very quietly, "And what was your role in it?" 

"Getting myself dismissed for recommending the guards be disciplined."

"You didn't participate?"

"No."

"He got away. How?"

"Maybe I locked the door badly."

Something does not add up. Combeferre feels chasms of omission, and he cannot tell what is in them. He is beginning to panic.

"You talked too easily. You're holding something back."

Javert shrugs.

Combeferre grabs the front of Javert's old coat with a force that throws Javert backwards in the chair, making it lurch onto two feet before the weight of Javert's long legs stabilizes it again. Javert raises his eyebrows slightly.

"You're withholding information," Combeferre snarls. "Tell me the information, and tell me why."

Javert gazes back, disinterested as the dead.

Ill-omened things are transpiring inside Combeferre, and he knows he is not as aware of them as he should be. He wishes again he had the gun.

Hastily, he lets go of Javert, noticing only then how fast he is breathing, how dark the room swims in his vision, how his heart hammers like the heart of a rabbit. His shirt is soaked under his clothes, he is far too hot, he cannot breathe. He rubs his hand against the skirt of his coat, wiping away the sweat. He cannot assuage the itching in his palm.

Javert raises his eyebrows. There really is no air in the room.

Combeferre turns and goes.

He walks fast down the overgrown dirt lanes, refusing to look behind him until he cannot bear it anymore--he looks and sees only the deserted road. He walks on. The fine, warm morning feels accursed.

He must be three miles away when he stops. He is nowhere, and he wants to be nowhere. He is breathing fast, and he discovers only as he stops that he is shaking badly. He crosses into the center of an empty field and sits down on the hard packed earth, warmed with the morning sun. He lies on his back in the prickling grass.

Above him, the sky burns huge and blue. He keeps staring at it, letting the vastness dazzle him, letting his breathing slow.

Carefully, as with a convalescent patient he fears to shock, he allows by slow degrees into his consciousness the realization he has what he came for.

Enjolras lived. And Combeferre knows where he went.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to niguedouille and prince-phosphore for help on locations for Courfeyrac's and Javert's residences, and to shellcollector for help with the treatment and diagnosis of hysteria. (Any mistakes are, as ever, mine.)
> 
> I can be found on tumblr at everyonewasabird.


	14. Death to Aristocrats, Peace to Cottages

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content note: grief, recovery from injury, descriptions of (past) major character deaths, memories of violence. Mention of the idea of suicide (Javert's).

_June, 1832_

Enjolras sleeps.

The expanse of it is timeless and measureless, like the depths of the ocean or the bottom of a grave. This thought raises no unpleasant associations, for he does not think. He is aware at times of the ebb and flow of pain: dull, then sharp, then dull again.

The first flickerings of awareness are dark twilight. Someone makes him drink water. He would prefer to discount the existence of a body, but the person attending to him reminds him of it repeatedly, with considerable indignity and pain. Between these spaces of twilight he sinks back down.

Gleams penetrate down into his semidarkness. Time is passing. A man occupies this empty garret with him--in panicked confusion he tries to believe it is one of the men he hopes for. It is not, but it is one he knows and has decided to trust. He plunges back into sleep with an eagerness that resembles fleeing.

There is sunlight on his closed eyelids. A lingering breeze strokes his hair from his forehead, and he thinks it is the hand of a friend. He wakes with the fading sunlight warm on his cheek. He knows they are not here. 

He heaves himself up on his elbow, though his body is granite; it elicits a startled grunt from Javert across the room. Enjolras was never much given to illness as a child, or gracelessness, or weakness--his disaffections with this body were never those. The heaviness of fever makes it feel as if his spirit has been cursed into clumsy and ill-fitting clay. Perhaps it has always felt like that.

The light through the dusty garret window is a blaze of late afternoon gold. Days have passed. He permitted himself a final month in Paris. How much is gone?

He believes them dead, but he cannot be sure--not absolutely, not given the confusion of battle. If even one of them lived, the world would be different.

"Paper," he rasps, and his desiccated voice is a blessing. In happier days, he took pains with it so as not to betray himself, and he has no capacity to do so now. Such secrets are a lost cause, and so, perhaps, is his dignity, but he clings to what scraps he can.

A tall shape occludes the light and crouches down. With the window behind him, it is difficult to make out the furrows of Javert's frown. The unkempt whiskers alongside his gloomy, bulldog face catch the bright gold from outside and turn his silhouette wolfish.

"Are you--"

"Ink. And a pen. Sealing wax."

Javert goes, and the stairs creak with his descent. Enjolras sways on his elbow and almost drops down again, but he does not think he could stay awake. Instead, he rises slowly to sit up, holding his knees and letting his head droop. Addresses rise in an out of focus in his brain, half-formed.

He starts back to confused awareness at Javert's return. It takes a moment to recall what he was doing.

"Good," he says.

He stands with no little pain and lurches to a small table under the window. His stomach dislikes it, his muscles dislike it, his head dislikes it--he clutches the table until the blackness clears from his vision, and then he drops into the chair and inks the pen, clumsily, spattering ink on the table.

He writes to Madame Combeferre, asking after her son. He writes to Musichetta, asking about Joly and Lesgles, to Lesgles's sister in Meaux and to Joly's parents outside of Digne. He writes to de Courfeyrac and the Mesdemoiselles de Courfeyrac in the Dordogne, and to Courfeyrac's mistress, the one Courfeyrac said could be trusted. He writes to Bahorel's mistress, Olympe Raboisson, a brother in arms for all that she was a woman, and to the Bahorels in Lyon--to a few of them, at any rate. He writes to Maria Diamantopoulou, the most trusted of Feuilly's compatriots at the atelier, and to Prouvaire's mother. He writes letters to each of his men also, for battle is chaos, and it has never felt so more than now. It may be that some of them simply went home. He writes to Grantaire's father, useless as that will be, and to Grantaire's sister, as if she might contradict what Enjolras knows he saw.

For he watched Grantaire shudder under the fusillade and fall, leaving Enjolras holding a dead man's hand. He saw Combeferre and Courfeyrac laid out gray and still with dark gashes through their bodies, side by side in the long row of dead. Bahorel's corpse lay among his friends for twenty-four hours, cold.

They did not live, any of them. He knows this. But hope is a habit not easily broken.

Over and over, he writes:

> What was his fate? If he lives, where is he? I may be found at the safe house in the Rue des Fourneaux, no. 12, until 7 July. If you know anything, if you have heard anything, send word as quickly as you can.
> 
> Please accept, etc, my sentiments,
> 
> Enjolras

It exhausts him and takes longer than it should. His hand gleams black as a boot by the end of it, for he blotted nothing properly. He examines the letters for legibility, rewriting where he must. In better days, he would have tossed out all these spotted scribblings and started again. But they are decipherable. They will do. He lays his pen down.

He is shivering as one should not shiver in an attic in Paris in June. The pain is creeping back up his flank like fire. Ignoring it is more exhausting than writing.

Someone grunts, and he becomes aware of Javert's large back facing him as Javert leans against the table, staring away into the shadows. Javert glances over and frowns.

"Lie down again."

"I need to address them."

Closed in Javert's big hand is a stick of sealing wax, which he taps absently against the table, grimacing as he thinks.

"I only have this month," Enjolras insists. "I need to send them tonight."

 _"I_ need to send them, you mean. If you didn't break your neck on the stairs you'd be arrested by the first gendarme who saw those bruises."

It is a window thrown open upon the city outside: in an instant, Enjolras understands how Louis-Philippe's government has closed its fist around Paris, arresting anyone who appears to have fought, perhaps anyone whose countenance it dislikes. The plight of his city breaks his heart, and he clings to it as a man in prison clings to word of a lover.

"Dictate," Javert says.

"To you?"

Javert grunts, irritated.

This incurs a far heavier risk than giving Javert access to the safe house or to Enjolras's own ill and defenseless person. The directory of names and addresses existed only in his own memory and that of a few others, for the Friends of the A B C never committed it to paper. In better days, Enjolras would never have surrendered it to a man not sworn to their circle, and still less to one once taken as a spy.

He listens to the quiet outside. This is a desolate spot where carriages rarely rattle past. There is no conversation in the street. Now and then there is birdsong, but not often.

He pushes himself up from the chair, tottering on shaky legs. He crosses the little distance and falls back onto the mattress where he curls up, shivering. There is a grunt, and something heavy and woolen falls on him. The shivering eases. He recognizes Javert's long coat.

He imagines again the possibility one of them lived, even one, and his body fills with a hollow longing worse than pain. He is feverish and grieving, and his thoughts are not to be relied on. Perhaps his longing is only one more weakness. It is difficult to tell from here.

And still, he hopes.

"Not the post," Enjolras says. "The landlord. Seal and address the letters as I direct you, and leave them for him on the stair. He will know how to dispose of them."

Javert grumbles but says at last, "Fine."

Enjolras begins reciting the addresses. Javert takes the vacated chair and writes.

\--

This garret is situated in an old building in poor repair, and the rotting wood groans. Enjolras starts up at every creak. Sleep eludes him, and the little he manages is fitful.

There has been no word.

The landlord leaves necessities at the foot of the stairs. It is only ever food or water, or, once, a few well-worn shirts too large for Enjolras and too small for Javert. They made do.

Enjolras rises and walks as he can, keeping a hand on the wall at first, graduating to pacing as his strength returns. Two weeks ago he was capable of beating back an army. Now a few lengths of the room exhaust him.

It is good, though. His physical weakness is a project. He requires one.

His pacing irritates Javert, who occupies his days staring at the wall. Enjolras does not know what has come of Javert's averted suicide. A few times he has broached cautious questions, but Javert merely stares with those flat, black eyes until he desists.

It is just as well. Enjolras does not wish to bare his soul either.

He grows stronger, and still there is no word. He essays the long, breakneck staircase himself, slowly, and carries the tray of food back up. Javert nods as Enjolras hands him bread and soup. Enjolras collapses onto his mattress and lies unmoving some minutes before he can eat. But he is improving.

Two days later, Javert rises and picks up his hat. There is no ceremony: he pauses and looks Enjolras over, then he nods and departs for good.

Enjolras listens to his measured step descending. The outer door shuts, and Javert's footfalls recede down the street.

Javert did not promise to live. He only promised that if he did live, he would meet Enjolras on the morning of the seventh. Enjolras is not a praying man, so he does not pray.

He hopes, though.

\--

Enjolras paces whole days now.

He left a note with the word _newspapers_ at the foot of the stairs with his dishes. Since then, there has always been a newspaper.

There were hundreds of deaths among the insurgents. Many were murdered by the National Guard as they surrendered or fled. Jeanne remains at large. Enjolras is not mentioned.

The papers have little to say about the Rue de la Chanvrerie. Enjolras reads one morning that it had no survivors. He retains no memory of the rest of that day.

The people will rebuild their networks and reformulate their plans. They will print pamphlets while this limited press freedom holds, and they will meet again in the back rooms of cafes and the upper floors of wineshops. Somewhere, a young man will whisper in the ear of his bonapartist friend that there is, perhaps, something greater than empire, and will you come with me tonight to such and such a place? These things will go on. These things cannot be broken.

A man can be.

There are cracks and shadows on Enjolras's heart that never used to be there. Grief and anger distort his reason. The light that once led him exists only in fragmentary glimpses, treacherous as ignes fatui. In the upheaval after the barricade, the memory of his friends was a balm; now it feels like a void he could drown in. He dares not let his thoughts linger on them.

As he paces, he thinks often of the murderous drunken porter, the police spy, Le Cabuc. He does not regret it. He saw no better choice then, and he sees none now. The revolution cannot countenance murder.

But summary execution is also murder. That Enjolras had no better option does not mean he is unstained.

Once, he would have asked his friends whether his reason can be trusted, whether his mind is sound. No man is infallible--Enjolras was not so at his best, and he is a long way from that now. But he is a person of force and certainty, to whom crowds listen. A desperate man is a dangerous thing. A desperate man with a voice that makes men follow is a worse one.

It was Enjolras's friends who poked fun at him, who flouted his orders, who told him when he was wrong. Their teasing and their arguments made him better than he was.

His letters have not been answered. He does not think they will be. 

There are friends of friends in Paris who would shelter him gladly: Musichetta, Olympe, Madame Diamantopoulou, a dozen others. He has known all along he will not go to them.

It is not punishment. One does not punish a man for choices made in desperate circumstances. Nevertheless.

The light that guided him is all but extinguished, and there is blood on his hands. His judgment is twisted by bitterness and grief. Were he to stay among revolutionaries, he would become a leader again. People would trust him. Perhaps, in time, he would trust himself.

There is no one left who can check his reasoning. He carries the weight of all his decisions on his back, and down to his bones he is weary. He finds himself wishing at odd moments to see his mother's face; it is not a wise impulse. She stands in for all the faces he will not see again.

The best that can be said of his parents is they never took him seriously--that is to say, they cannot be overawed. If Marseille is nothing else, it is a place where he can do no harm.

He loves the world too much to be a danger to it.

\--

On the evening of the sixth of July, he risks the streets. It is after nine o'clock, and the summer twilight blazes dark blue overhead, making shadowy uncertainties of the passing faces.

In his breast pocket is a passport, forged, for Bahorel once told him their landlord knew men who could procure such things. Enjolras left a note requesting a passport on his tray a week ago, and with it a sealed letter containing the destination of Marseille, his own physical description, and a few banknotes. The document that appeared some days later has its signatures in order and a physical description enough like him to excite no suspicion. The name it gives is pleasingly nondescript.

There are over two hundred francs in his pocket, donated by all and secreted in the safe house for the use of whomever might come. Enjolras had offered a portion to Javert before his departure. Javert had made an extraordinary grimace and turned his back.

It is strange to be outside walking the streets like other men. Javert reported all their names to the authorities when he escaped the barricade. Enjolras has no idea whether he is hunted. He keeps his chin in his cravat and his hat pulled low--easy enough, for it and this worn coat are far too large. This is his last chance to gather his clothes and any tangible remnants of eight years in Paris.

He reaches his own front door.

He enters calmly and greets his portress in passing. She nods and returns to her book. Her incuriosity was half the appeal of this place.

He ascends the stair, unlocks his door, and enters. The windows are shut, the air close. It smells of home. People he loved have breathed this air.

Suddenly, the world is refracted through tears flooding hot down his face. He cannot catch his breath; he had forgotten about weeping. He catches the faint scent of the grounds of Combeferre's coffee from that morning, and it fells him like an axe through the chest. He has presence of mind enough to bolt the door as he goes down.

Later, he pushes himself up and stumbles down the hall, not to his own spartan bedchamber but to Combeferre's cluttered one, nebulous in the darkness but nevertheless familiar, with its incomprehensible diagrams still tacked to the walls and every conceivable surface piled with books. Enjolras blunders over the empty munitions crates and drops into the unmade bed. The bedclothes and pillow smell of Combeferre.

He trusts to their thickness to muffle the sobs.

\--

The streets are dark; dawn will be some hours yet. In the damp chill, Enjolras smells the summer day to come. He carries a single valise. He abandoned the priceless treasure of his and Combeferre's shared book collection, for he could not bear to choose. Doubtless his landlady will sell off everything when the rent expires.

He walks through Paris weeping.

The valise is heavy, but he does not go directly to meet the diligence. Rather he wanders, lingering over the sights of the city one last time. He chooses streets by instinct, letting his feet recall these shopfronts, these paving stones. There are few people about at this hour, and those he passes hold still in the darkness, unwilling to be seen. The malignant, the indifferent, the dangerous, and the sad all feel tonight like his brothers. To say he will miss them does not capture it. This walk is a last look at a living, beating part of himself before he severs it.

He glimpses the Seine, a blur of pale mist in the darkness, and he fills his lungs with the stagnant cold rising from the water. Then he turns away down one more narrow, winding street. He will not lose his way wandering thus. He cannot; it is Paris.

\--

At dawn he stands in the Cour des Messageries, a large courtyard off of the Rue Montmartre. His valise is beside him. A few diligences stand alongside the buildings. The courtyard is dark gray with mist. Men tend to the horses. Few passengers are yet arrived.

A tall man steps forward from the shadows of a building. His hat is pulled low over his eyes, but he comes close enough that Enjolras can see the emptiness in them. No doubt Enjolras's own are very red.

Enjolras nods. Javert grunts. They stand side by side, facing the diligences. 

Gradually, the courtyard fills with people. Friends embrace and say their goodbyes. Dogs bark, and a peddler hawks his wares. Somewhere, a baby is crying.

"I mean to go south," Enjolras says. "My parents. You?"

"Staying."

"Family?"

Javert snorts like the notion is absurd.

"What will you do?"

"I have hands. I'm not proud."

If Javert were a friend, Enjolras might argue, for Javert's pride hangs about him more evidently than his long, gray coat does. But he says nothing.

The postillions have opened the doors and are handing up the luggage. The sun is high enough that the mist blazes white around the blue shadows of men and horses.

Enjolras turns, holding out his hand. Javert stares a moment, then he shrugs and shakes it. Enjolras recalls a different clasping of different hands, and a smile so gentle the rifles pointed at his heart meant nothing. This is not that.

But it matters. It matters there are two of them, and it matters what Javert did, and did not do, on the barricade and after. There are days that blur together into a dull horror Enjolras hopes will fade, but they also matter. It matters that Javert is still here.

So Enjolras gathers the last fragments of light that remain to him, and he gazes into Javert's dead face and smiles.

"Thank you," he says.

Something flickers in Javert's frown. His tall back straightens. What was empty in his face settles a little more into calm.

They step apart, and Enjolras boards the diligence for Marseille.

\--

The morning mists glow radiant white and cool gray by turns as the diligence lurches with a violent clatter through the shadows of the buildings. Enjolras was early enough to be assigned a window seat. The bewhiskered man beside him makes some commonplace remarks, then desists. Enjolras paid all the day's posts in advance so the postillions would not disturb him.

He watches laborers making their way to work alone or in pairs, magnified by the shadows they cast upon the misty air. Two shadows lean together, perhaps in laughter. Tired horses draw heavy carts to market. Their old heads seem to nod goodbye.

The diligence reaches the Seine and turns west. The brilliancy of the water stings his eyes, but he does not weep, not here. He hopes with all his heart that those who next take up the cause of France will help her more than he could.

They exit by the Barrière de Passy, and the bustle of the city opens out into the farmland that feeds her. They pass the long lines of carts going the other way, queuing to pay taxes on wares brought to market. Worn men and women slump in their carts as they wait, and children sleep half sitting up among the produce. 

The carts fall away behind. Paris gives way to countryside.

The fields look deceptively quiet from this distance, dew-washed and glittering around the tiny figures who work in them. A few parcels of farmland and a handful of poor huts circumscribe the lives of generations. The education that should belong to all people is far from the reach of the poor within the city, but it is farther still from the peasants out here.

And yet. These peasants have risen before to fight for their dignity and rights and livelihoods. They too are brothers he is leaving behind.

The days are long and the ride uncomfortable, as all travel is, and his heart does not lighten the hours. He disembarks whenever he can to stretch his legs, which are long enough to be constricted in these cramped and jolting seats.

The first day is fine and bright, but the next few are rainy, and he appreciates it. It is not as if he is in any hurry. He waits a little distance from the post while the horses are changed, facing away into the grain fields studded with isolated copses of trees. For a blessed quarter hour, he allows the twilight to conceal him and the rain to bead on his hair and coat and wash the free-flowing tears from his face.

His outward calm is sufficient for the hours on the road. He always purchases a private room at the inns, though the lumpy beds of indifferent cleanliness do nothing to improve his sleeping. Sometimes he paces whole nights, giving vent to the storms he locks away by day. Innkeepers rarely inquire in the morning, so long as they are assured he is going.

He is only a little delayed by the rain. In a week, he reaches Lyon.

Lyon is like Paris and not like Paris: she is rougher, smaller, vibrant in her way, but a stranger to him. The instant he steps out of the carriage, he feels the strangeness of being in a city and not knowing where he is. He stands in a vast public square where people mill about. The sun is blinding on the white facings of the surrounding buildings and the reddish pavement, and the day is hot. The French that bubbles around him carries a different accent and is interspersed with Lyonnaise, which he does not speak. He smells the scents of a city again: dust, stone, manure, and the cooking of foods he cannot identify. Forested hills rise beyond the buildings on what must be the other bank of the Saône, crowned by the the spires of a cathedral.

He stretches his cramped back, hefts his valise, and turns to ask a postilion to direct him to an inn. Someone behind him cries out a greeting; he ignores it. It cannot be for him.

Someone claps him on the back, and it is all he can do to throttle the instincts of violent self-defense he has had too much need of in recent memory. He turns.

The person is a woman, large and tall, with her sunburnt cheeks flushed red with hurry, beaming at him from a height hardly less than his own. The messy upsweep of her black hair is shot through with gray. Her clothes are of sturdy peasant cloth, well-fitted and brightly patterned. There are parcels under her arm and more in the arms of several children trailing after her.

"Momo's friend, aren't you?" she asks, adjusting the parcels. "It's good to see you well. Or--well enough." She squints to examine his face more keenly than he likes. "Upright, at any rate. It was a bad one this time. Certainly it was for us."

Her smile turns sadder, and Enjolras cannot place her or the name she used. She must see it, for she snorts.

"That's good, I was never going to come up with your name either. I don't forget a face, though--certainly not a face like yours."

She holds out her hand.

"Fraise Bahorel."

The breath goes out of him. He sees the resemblance now, in her beaky nose and smiling eyes. Bahorel's eldest sister visited Paris some years ago. He had been busy that week with something that seems terribly unimportant from this distance.

Something must go wrong, for he discovers himself cold and dizzy and breathing too heavily, with a darkness over his eyes. Bahorel's sister is speaking cheerfully about commonplace subjects that require no answers, supporting him with an arm looped through his that is not less strong than her brother's.

She makes Enjolras sit on the edge of the low wall surrounding an equestrian statue of some king; he is not looking closely. He leans forward until the dizziness dissipates. As his vision clears, he sees one of her children gaping at him, a gawky, wild-looking girl still some way from the brink of adolescence, whatever age that is. He knows nothing of children. Fraise Bahorel sits beside him.

"I'm sorry," he says. "I'm sorry for--"

"Pardieu! I trust you never spoke in such a way to my brother. Now--I think it started with an E?"

He has no suspicion of her; quite the contrary. But knowledge of him may be a curse that brings authorities where they are not wanted. From everything Bahorel has boasted about his family, authorities are very much not wanted.

"Edouard," he says.

"Of course," she says. "On the tip of my tongue. And you're coming to dinner and staying a while, so that's settled."

"You are very kind. But the diligence leaves in two hours, and I must remain near it."

"Oh must you? Important business, is it?"

"I'm going home."

"And home is...?"

Home is Paris. Home will always be Paris.

"Marseille."

She pats his shoulder, a disconcerting habit. He finds it irritating, and he finds it has been an unbearably long time since a friend last touched him. The confluence of those things does not render him friendlier.

He has no idea how to air an appropriate amount of grief in the company of people who loved Bahorel. He fears it will rip him open--or worse, he will shut up like a leaden box and be cold where he should have been kind. It is possible he has already done this. It is not in him to do otherwise.

"Good," she says. "Family is good. Send a letter on ahead and tell them you're staying with us a while. If you need an explanation, tell them from me that I couldn't in good conscience send them a prodigal son who hadn't eaten in a month. I remember you perfectly, you were a fine figure of a man three years ago, nowhere near this thin."

"It is a kind offer--"

"'Offer' implies I'm giving you a choice."

"Madame--or Mademoiselle, rather--or--"

His confusion makes her snort. "Citizeness does well enough."

He cannot pretend his heart does not warm at that. However.

"Citizeness, you are kind. But I have business."

"I see you do indeed." She says it with a wry twist of her mouth whose import he does not follow. "But I'll not keep you if you don't wish to be kept--come!"

The word is enough to regather her wandering children. She gets up. Enjolras flinches lest she pat his shoulder again, and when she does not, he feels bereft. He would apologize for his rudeness if he thought it would help.

As it is, he drops his head back down and lets Fraise Bahorel and her children recede into the crowd.

\--

The time he was hoping to gain is lost, for he remains sitting on the wall almost an hour. Each time he begins to rise, he finds himself veering towards a fit of hysterics he can ill afford in this public place. The scrutiny of doctors, after all, is not less dangerous to him than the scrutiny of gendarmes.

In the end, he pulls himself together with enough time left to find if not a full meal, at least a _bouchon_ that will quickly fry and sell him a cutlet of breaded beef tripe. It is a local specialty--Bahorel bragged often of the food of Lyon. Enjolras returns to the statue in the square to eat, for from there he has a good view of the diligence. The _tablier de Gnafron_ has no taste because food has no taste anymore. He trusts it will do its job regardless.

By his watch, he has half an hour left; very well. He will not be sorry to put distance between himself and a place that can undo his composure so utterly. He finishes his meal and checks his breast pocket for his passport.

He does not find it.

In an instant his heart is racing and his hands are frantic in all the rest of his pockets--though he is an organized man, and he never stows papers at hazard. He finds his purse and counts his money. None is missing. But his passport is not here.

He casts about him at the innocent-looking passersby. He had it coming into Lyon, for they checked it at the city gates. Traveling without papers would bring the law on him in the next fortified town they passed through. Reporting them missing would invite scrutiny he cannot afford.

He crosses and recrosses the square, scanning the ground. He runs back to the _bouchon,_ then he hurries to the post and questions the postilions. He dashes back to the statue once more. He is panting and hot, and his valise is growing unmanageable. The food sits uncomfortably heavy in his stomach.

The authorities of Lyon cannot be as dangerous to him as those in Paris. Applying for another passport will not take more than a few days, and it is only his brittle state of mind that finds catastrophic upheaval in a slight change of plan. It would, however, require someone to vouch for his name and face, and he has no connections here--

But, of course, he does.

Enjolras stills, recalling his earlier encounter. If the document did not slip out--and it should not have, that pocket is secure--it was taken by someone who got close enough to do it.

Was she really Bahorel's sister? Even if she was, what does he know of Bahorel's sister?

A queer coldness comes over him, for all that he is hot with running. His back and shoulder still tingle with the imprint of her hands. Her touch had recalled to him the hands of friends. The violation does something violent and ugly to the interior of his body. He is not accustomed to being weak, and when he has been weak, he has always trusted the people he allowed near him.

Growing in him he feels a frightening and disproportionate fury his reason can do nothing to prevent.

\--

The passengers are gathering by the diligence. The horses have been changed. Enjolras paces, searching the ground, clinging to hope that Bahorel's sister was not the thief--he wishes for that almost more than he wishes to find it.

He hears a postilion call his false name. They are closing the doors. The postilions remount their horses. The coachman flicks his whip, and with a clatter muffled across the length of the square, the diligence moves off.

Enjolras sinks down on the wall and folds his arms on his knees, letting his forehead rest on them. He will figure out something. For the moment, he only needs to stop running.

A long while later, the cool shadow of a building reaches his back, rousing him. He had not realized how unbearable the sun was until he is relieved of it. He will need to make arrangements for the night.

A child stands some way away, watching him.

He squints, and then he recognizes the eldest of Bahorel's sister's children. Instantly, he is on his feet and running. The child grins, cheeky and unafraid. Her grin only falters when he is close enough to grab her, which he refrains from by too fine a margin. She must see it on his baleful face, for her eyes go wide.

"Maman--"

"Where is your mother?"

"H-home, monsieur."

He is frightening a child. Enjolras forces himself to step back and readjust his expression.

"Would you," he says, "please take me to her?"

Immediately she is relaxed and grinning again. "Ah, good! She said I was to bring you even if you didn't want to come, and I had no idea how I was going to do it. I feared we might be late for supper. Bah! We don't want that. Come along!"

She takes his arm and begins to pull him. He is angry, but she is a child. This is not her doing.

"My papers?"

"Safe, maman said to tell you. And nobody peeked, she said to tell you that too. She said Bahorels always respect an alias."

Enjolras feels a battle being waged, and he is the battleground. This child and her instructions are one more enemy volley.

"I will leave my valise at the inn and follow directly."

"You're to bring it. You're staying with us, maman said."

Enjolras bites back a retort about thieves and goes about finding an inn.

\--

"All right," the child says, dragging on Enjolras's arm as if he is not at all intimidating, "you've at last got rid of it. May we finally go?"

"Yes."

The child leads him through streets of fine houses and shopfronts and over a bridge on the Saône, for the bulk of Lyon occupies the narrow peninsula formed by the confluence of the Saône and the Rhone. She seems inclined to chatter, pointing out to him notable landmarks. Government buildings and churches pass unremarked, but Enjolras learns which of the smithies will not cheat him when he needs his horses shod, which house belongs to her Uncle Bitume's mistress, which of the _bouchons_ serve food fit for gods, and which one her cousin got sick from last month. The child spends some time detailing just how sick, and Enjolras does not listen, for such talk reminds him sharply of Joly. She points out the hill rising beyond the river to the north and tells him it is the Croix Rousse, where the ateliers of the canuts are.

He read much last year about the silk weavers' revolt against the merchants and the city government: how the canuts rose against grueling working conditions and the merchants' refusal to set silk prices to be worth their labor; how they marched down from the Croix Rousse upon the Hotel de Ville, rallying the city as they went; how they overcame the rifles and bayonets of the National Guard by force of numbers and won control of Lyon. They led by provisional government for more than a week before surrendering peacefully to the king's arriving armies.

Enjolras stares at the hill, which shines red-hued in the late afternoon sun. The child pulls him the other way.

The buildings grow sparse and soon fall behind altogether. The street becomes a rutted dirt lane, climbing the steep bluffs along the river. The walk should be nothing, but he struggles, out of breath.

"How far is it?"

"Maman said if you complained, I was to tell you the cart was in town when she invited you, and it's your own fault for missing a free ride." Her slightly dirty face looks smug, possibly at having been allowed to admonish an adult.

Examining her is a mistake. Her hair is a dark red-brown rather than black, but it tends towards the same intractable curls Bahorel's did. Already she shows hints of what must be the family nose, and there is something of Bahorel, too, in the line of her chin. More than Bahorel, though, in her cheerful brazenness he sees Gavroche--or what Gavroche might have been had he been fed and loved.

"What is your name?" he asks.

"Legal or illegal?"

The Bahorel family appears to have taken full advantage of the freedom of naming during the Revolution. Enjolras, born after Buonaparte restricted naming laws and having been raised in far more conservative circles, had known Bahorel six months before he really believed 'Mort aux Aristocrates' was his given name.

"Tell me both."

"Paix aux Chaumines," she says. "Or 'Marie' if you're the government."

The road has steepened, winding up a hillside of woods and meadow. Enjolras is panting, and his legs shake. The child drags on his arm for some distance like she can make him go faster, then she drops it and darts on ahead, hiking up her dusty checkered skirt and baring skinny brown legs as she leaps from stone to stone. She stops a quarter mile up the road, tapping her foot as he catches up, and when he reaches her she runs on again. Her talk, when he can hear it, has turned towards speculating on what supper may be, perhaps in hopes this will inspire him to move faster.

It does not. He drops onto a stone to catch his breath.

When he looks up, she has come back and folded her arms with a scowl, likely one her mother uses on misbehaving children.

"Are all Parisians so puny? My smallest brother can make this hill, and he's not five yet."

"Where did your mother learn to pick pockets?" Enjolras snaps.

Paix aux Chaumines brightens. "I hoped you'd ask that. I'm to tell you maman's little brother was bored when they tried to apprentice him in the city, so he taught himself and then taught her. I asked which uncle it was, but she said you'd know. Who was it?"

"Mort aux Aristocrates," Enjolras says.

The child goes quiet. After a moment, she takes a seat beside him on the stone.

One could grasp the nature of Bahorel's heart in an instant and from a long way off, by the howl on his lips, the strike of his fists, and the fierce clap of his hand on a comrade's shoulder. That he was brilliant was almost a secret; when Enjolras once mentioned it, Bahorel swore him to silence, only half in jest.

Paix aux Chaumine stares down the hill towards the straggling houses and the city beyond. Her frown resembles Bahorel's at his most thoughtful. Enjolras feels a sudden, terrible pain and turns away.

She waits out the remainder of his much-needed rest without complaint.

\--

The sky is white with twilight, and the shadows under the trees are gloomy by the time Enjolras, much beleaguered, reaches the crown of the hill. A square stone farmhouse lies ahead. Stretching away from it down the gentle, landward slope are a couple of hectares of field and a considerable orchard of small trees that seem in the obscurity bare as midwinter.

The umber shadows of firelight glimmer in a couple of the unglazed windows near the farmhouse door, though the bulk of the building appears dark. The rich, meaty smell of whatever is cooking inside drifts out.

Paix aux Chaumines has been more helpful during this last leg of the journey, keeping by Enjolras's side and directing him away from treacherous footing. Being so close to food, however, overrides their tentative truce. She bolts for the door and vanishes inside quick as an eel.

"Zozo!" her mother's voice booms out, "What kept you? Is he coming?" The child's reply is too low to hear.

Fraise Bahorel's voice revives his agitation. His heart, gradually slowing after the exertion, picks up its pace again, beating the charge.

The unlatched door swings open at his knock.

The inside is darker than the evening. It is full of people, but all he perceives in the obscurity is heat, chaos, noise, and fire. A child shrieks, earsplitting, and Enjolras shudders before he can ascertain the child is only teased by an older sister. He pauses on the threshold, regathering himself, letting his eyes and his composure adjust.

He is peering into a cramped and overcrowded kitchen. A couple of young children chase each other about a long table where the older children sit and a young woman sews in the dim firelight. Fraise Bahorel leans over her stove, stirring something with her back to him. Through a doorway, he sees a room beyond with a dim blur of beds. The living quarters occupy far less space than the farmhouse possesses, and he cannot tell why.

"That you, Edouard?" Fraise Bahorel asks. "Have a seat, it'll be ready directly."

That ugly chill has not left him. Her lack of contrition should not matter--she is the family of someone he loved. Enjolras has never been vengeful, and his temper has not exceeded his control in years.

It is running away from him now, careening downhill and almost out of his grip. The long shadows cast by the barricade are never far these days. He has been monstrous; war makes men monstrous. He feels in his fury the shadow of the marble monster he became in the last minutes of the barricade, who severed a soldier's fingers in a slamming door and broke bottles of nitric acid over men's heads. It is perhaps some little mercy that none of his friends lived to see the brutal end.

"My papers," he says in a voice like ice.

The children go still. Abruptly, there is no sound but the crackling fire. Fraise Bahorel wipes her hands on her apron and turns. She looks him over and says to her assembled family, "Other room."

They file out and shut the door, though a stifled susurrance alerts him there is no privacy. Enjolras folds his arms, regarding her with the coldest of his glares.

She rummages in a pocket and holds his passport out to him. He snatches it and turns for the door.

"He was never any good at repetitive tasks," she says. "Worse at delicate ones. But he was the cleverest person I ever knew."

Enjolras freezes with his hand on the latch.

"Silk is delicate work. Silkworms more so, fat little gluttons though they are." She sees his puzzled frown and snorts. "Magnanery," she says, nodding at the house. "Silk farming? City folks really are something, can you not tell at a glance? Pardieu. Sit, and I'll talk."

She fills a wooden bowl with soup and lays it on the table with a hunk of bread.

"Eat."

It is a battle, and she knows exactly what Enjolras's weaknesses are. The desire to hear more overmasters him. He goes to the table and sits. She stares until he begins to eat.

"Well. My brother had none of the patience it took to feed silkworms hour after hour, nor to stoke the fires all day. Even stripping the mulberry leaves or hoeing the field or minding the goats never held his attention more than a day or two. But he read every book he could get hold of cover to cover. He used to tell me how everything we did was invented and kept secret by clever men in China a thousand years before us. 

"'Clever _women_ in China,' I told him. 'It's women's work.'

"'All right,' he said, 'clever women, then.'

"It wasn't just books--he was always our source of news from the city. Papa tried apprenticing him to the canuts, but weaving was a worse idea for him than anything else we tried. He would come home having done no work but knowing all the gossip in Lyon. We started to despair of him, the things he came back knowing. This place was never the life for a boy like that."

She stares into the stove a moment, then comes to the table and drops heavily into a seat. Her eyes are firelit with tears.

Enjolras covers his face, ceding the last ground. He feels drained and lost. He will not make it back to town tonight, nor would he go if he could.

Their silence must signal disarmament, for there is clatter and commotion and an inundation of children. The room grows raucous with hungry people arguing and filling the seats at the table. As Paix aux Chaumines runs by, she kisses her mother's head, pats Enjolras's with startling effrontery, and then pushes her way to the front of the line for soup. When she has it, she drops into the place beside him. His half-eaten bread finds its way to the other side of her bowl and soon vanishes.

Fraise wipes her eyes with her apron, sighs, rises, and lightly swats the top of her daughter's head as she goes to serve herself.

"He wasn't hungry, maman."

"Did you ask him?"

"He wasn't."

A much smaller child has ventured round the table. The child's hair is a mess of dark curls, its smock is nondescript, and nothing else gives Enjolras any clue to the sex. It hands Enjolras a wooden doll, prattling at length and with some forcefulness in infantine Lyonnaise; Enjolras does not understand a word.

There is a portrait somewhere in the drafty reaches of the Enjolras family home in which Enjolras, about this age, sits between his father and mother, wearing a lacy and hideous dress, with his hair smoothed down brutally and strangled in bows. His own face is somber, his father's severe, and his mother's sad. They sit as far apart as they might and still share a painting.

Back then, when he was not studying at his mother's instruction from immense books of Latin, Greek, algebra, and history nor rambling in the solitary wilds of their country estate, his society was the spotless, gleaming salons of Marseille's elite. To the best of his memory, he sat still and listened to the adults in silence, as was expected.

With a few words of incomprehensible remonstrance, the child takes back the doll, pronounces upon Enjolras some emphatic formula, and toddles away again.

The trusting fearlessness of Bahorel's sister's children unnerves him a little.

Over the din of conversation, Enjolras hears male voices outside. Hardly has he time for alarm when the door is thrown open with a gruff shout and two men storm in.

Soldiers, he thinks.

But the men are laughing, and the children shriek in welcome. Enjolras unclenches his hands and sits back. The men fill bowls with soup and take seats with the family. They speak in intermingled French and Lyonnaise of conversations they have been having with the canuts: of strikes, of plans against the merchants and the prefect, of the memberships of mutual societies and funds amassed.

One man stops suddenly with his glass half raised, staring at Enjolras. "Ah," he says. "Good evening, Monsieur. And your politics are...?"

"Mort aux Aristocrates," Fraise says quietly.

The man puts down his glass and snatches up Enjolras's hand. His face is broader than Bahorel's and older, his eyes more hooded, his hair grayer. None of it matters. For an instant, Enjolras is staring into Bahorel's living face again.

"The brother of my brother is my brother," the man says, and even his voice, in the timbre, the accent, and the energy, is Bahorel's. Enjolras cannot speak. The man claps his shoulder and resumes his talk of sedition.

The voices of women and children carry little resonance in Enjolras's memory, and what recollections they raise are unpleasant. It is different hearing men laugh about revolution.

In this dark and smoky farmhouse, scenes he has been trying not to think of flow back into his mind. He remembers the talk and laughter of his friends, and the dead places in his heart crack like seeds under spring rain.

\--

Enjolras's cheek is resting on his arm, which lies upon the table. His neck is stiff, his ribs ache from sleeping in a corset, and his heart feels lighter than it has in some time. His head is foggy from long, deep sleep.

Fraise stands over the stove in the early-morning sunlight through the glassless window. The fire is ablaze, and the air is thick with smoke and coffee and cooking meat. Enjolras shifts his head and discovers a goatskin laid over his shoulders. He closes his eyes again.

"You had a big, close family, didn't you?" Fraise asks, sounding amused. "I can always tell, nobody else can sleep through that."

Enjolras, still half asleep, speaks the truth before he can examine it: "Yes."

"We did have a bed for you. You'll have the attic if you stay. Zozo wanted to wake you last night--she loves the attic, and she's not allowed in it, it's too easy to miss a rafter and crack through the floor. I can't claim you won't find fancier lodging than this, if that's your pleasure. Coffee?"

"Please."

A scalding cup is put into his hands. He sips it, closing his eyes at the taste of coffee. In the other room, children are beginning to quarrel in escalating pitches.

"Well then," Fraise says. "Have I persuaded you to stay?"

"For a little while," Enjolras says. "Thank you."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Name translations for Bahorel's family:
> 
>  _Fraise_ \- strawberry  
>  _Bitume_ \- asphalt  
>  _Mort aux Aristocrates_ \- death to aristocrats  
>  _Paix aux Chaumines_ \- peace to cottages
> 
> Thank you so much to Midutumnnightdream, Theseviolentdelights, Shellcollector, PilferingApples, and Injygo for help with names!
> 
> Here is a little bit about French Revolutionary naming: http://www.nancy.cc/2011/09/09/revolution-era-names-in-france/
> 
> And thank you to Synteis for the idea of Bahorel's family being silkworm farmers!


End file.
